


Kouros

by CyanideBreathmint



Series: even honey bees [3]
Category: Ghost in the Shell (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Car Porn, Competence Porn, Content warning: Discussion of a queer person murdered due to homophobia, Content warning: Discussion of bigoted parents disowning their 20-year-old LGBTQIA child, Content warning: Frank discussion of fetishes possible only in a science fiction setting, Content warning: Frank discussion of non-Western queer identities, Content warning: Frank discussion of potentially exploitative sex work, Content warning: Proto pretty much has a tiny nervous breakdown from stress, Food Porn, Gen, Suit Porn, True Companions, content warning: discussion of homophobia, content warning: discussion of racism, content warning: discussion of sexism, content warning: genre-typical gore and violence, content warning: racial microaggressions, content warning: violence against children, gunporn, navel gazing extreme sport edition, sad robot boy in sad cyberpunk city
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-28
Updated: 2021-02-22
Packaged: 2021-03-14 17:33:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 51,209
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29049954
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CyanideBreathmint/pseuds/CyanideBreathmint
Summary: Proto, Section 9's latest rookie, embarks on his first combat op with the team, in a daring hostage rescue bid.Content warning: Violence against children.Content warning: Genre-typical gore and violence.
Relationships: Proto & Section 9
Series: even honey bees [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2123595
Comments: 22
Kudos: 5





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> The first two fic titles starting with K? That was a coincidence. This one? Not so much. Might as well make it a theme.

Proto has just pulled his long, fine hair into a topknot when the Major speaks. “All right, team,” she says, “stand by for braindive.”

At that Proto reaches reflexively for the encrypted braindive session she’s set up in her cyberbrain. The human members of his team pause in their various actions, their gazes growing vaguely unfocused as they turn their mutual attentions towards the briefing, but Proto’s hands continue moving automatically as he wraps most of the length of his hair neatly around a loop pulled out of the ponytail. Unlike humans, he can split his consciousness between the physical and digital worlds. It’s one of the conveniences of being an AI based on a biologic neurochip. He can multi-thread his sense of self. This, of course, is not a recommended course of action for life-and-death matters. But he’s just putting his hair up right now, and that’s a trivial task that he can do while he’s also being briefed. 

Major Kusanagi begins her briefing without further preamble. “26 minutes ago, the Niihama Friends International School was attacked by an unknown number of terrorists. Initial reports indicate that they are armed with SMGs. A police headcount and witness accounts have confirmed at least 30 hostages, maybe more. Most of the hostages are children between the ages of 11 to 13.”

There’s a tremor of disgust in their shared thought, just as Proto picks up the bobby pin he has been holding between his lips, and slides it through his knot of hair. That will hold it. His hands return to the Seburo C26-A SMG he’s carrying safed on a quick-release sling across his chest as he turns his full attention to the briefing

“This isn’t the American Empire,” Batou says, his mental voice loaded with scorn, “this sort of thing shouldn’t happen here.” 

“No, it shouldn’t,” Major Kusanagi agrees, “but it has. We are going in by order of the Prime Minister to support police hostage rescue elements and resolve this crisis without any loss of innocent life. And if we manage to take any of those terrorists alive for questioning, that’s a bonus objective.”

“Have they made any demands yet?” Togusa asks. 

“As of yet, no,” the Major says, “which is unusual. Ishikawa. Found anything interesting about any of the possible hostages?” 

Ishikawa’s reply comes a second later. “Not ye- wait. You’ll want to see this, Major, some kid managed to get a video feed out before the terrorists jammed the comms.”

A video enters their shared vision then, one snatched off the web by Ishikawa before it was deleted off social media. In it a shadow stretches menacingly across a blood-smeared wood floor as a door swings open, and a large hand reaches swiftly down and drags the person taking the video out of the space they were in — clearly a storage closet of some kind. 

“My name is Mana,” a teenager pants in English, forcing the words out through sheer terror, “and they’re taking us hostage — they’ve already shot Mrs —” 

Her words break off in a cry of pain as a loud clap breaks into audio, the distinctive crack of an open-handed slap. “Let me go, let me — SEND HELP —” Her voice rises into a shriek as she’s dragged away, her feet slipping and skidding on puddles of blood.

The video ends as abruptly as it began, in a cloud of static.

“I’ve already identified her by voiceprint and social media account, Major,” Ishikawa says in the silence that follows, and the teenager’s personal information follows. Proto checks out the files sent over to him, gives them a quick glance. 

The girl’s name is Mana Tanaka Hughes, British-Japanese dual citizen, daughter of a wealthy businessman and his corporate lawyer wife. Her parents are perhaps involved in some shady tax shelter business, but nothing shady enough to provoke an attack of this magnitude. She’s probably not the real target of the terrorists, if this is more than just a hostage-taking for outrage. 

“Brave kid,” Togusa murmurs, to mental nods of agreement. “And that’s one dead or wounded hostage confirmed, at least from what we heard and saw. Looks like she’s made a habit of hacking past the school’s miniscule comms maze to post to social media instead of paying attention to class.”

“That would explain why she’s the only one who got a call to help out before the jamming started,” Saito says. “The benefits of skiving off, huh.” She’s probably a bright kid, Proto thinks, and bored enough in class to devise a way to keep herself entertained. He checks her grades, which appear to support his theory. They’re high in a few subjects that she’s interested in, and average everywhere else. 

“This is a school for rich kids,” Ishikawa points out, “the children of plutocrats, diplomats, and blue bloods. That’s a lot of potential international blowback if any of their precious offspring get killed.”

“And add roughly 30 additional possible motives for the attack.” The Major’s thoughts sound just a bit sour, there. “Ishikawa, continue to analyze that video for more clues. Saito, the police are turning one of their drones over to you. Use it to see if you can break through their visual curtain and scope the scene out. Everyone else, get ready and stand by.”

Major Kusanagi ends the briefing session then, but Proto stays behind in her mindspace, maintaining his connection to her. “Major,” he thinks at her.

“Proto. What is it?” she asks.

“I’m concerned about the high number of possible casualties. We lack Tachikoma support and can’t send them in to shield the hostages.” Section 9’s new tank platforms, the Uchikomas, are still being fabricated and assembled at the Kenbishi foundries in Harima, and are not ready to deploy, not for another two months or so.

It’s obvious that the Major has thought of this already. “That’s a possible problem, yes. What do you think?”

“I volunteer to take point,” Proto thinks at her. “I’m harder to injure than anyone else except perhaps you or Batou, I’m more expendable than the hostages, and I’m also wearing body armor.”

There’s a little bit of mental static, like a sigh. “You’re talking about physically interposing yourself between the hostages and the terrorists,” she thinks at him. “There’s still a chance they could kill you permanently, backup body or no.” 

Proto knows the risks, himself. They can hot-swap his neurochip to a new body as long as it remains mostly intact — he survived catastrophic failure of what amounts to his motherboard a month before, after a bad run-in with an attack barrier. But the right kind of headshot with the right kind of ammunition — armor-tipped exploding ammo, the same kind Section 9 uses against combat cyborgs — will punch right through his titanium skull and reduce the complex workings of his cognition into so much shrapnel.

“It’s going to take more than an SMG to get through our body armor at center-of-mass,” Proto explains. “Anyone trying to kill an average 13-year-old is going to have to aim lower than my head. In the worst case scenario it would probably take two or three of us to block most of the shots aimed at the hostages depending on how the terrorists are standing, but I’m not volunteering anyone else for anything I wouldn’t do myself.” He accompanies that statement with the mental equivalent of a shrug. It’s not as though he likes getting shot. Nobody does. But it is a very real fact that he lives in a biosynthetic body capable of regenerating in a span of hours, given the right supportive treatment.

The Major remains silent for a moment or two, before she replies. “Very well. I’ll consider the option. Stand by.” 

—

More intel has come in by the time Section 9’s team has landed, and Saito has taken off in a police helicopter to see if he can find a good location to set up a sniper perch. Niihama Prefecture Police’s hostage rescue operators have deferred politely to Section 9’s expertise and authority, partly because of Togusa’s expert liaising, but also because they’d rather have the blame fall collectively on Section 9 rather than themselves if it turns into a bloodbath. That is the way the sausage is made, as some people would put it. Good thing the school’s based in a modern four-storey building. It’s something operators can infiltrate easily, unlike say, a consular office on the 40th floor of a skyscraper. 

“Ishikawa, report,” the Major says silently, through their cybercomms, “How’s the police surveillance job going?”

Ishikawa’s mental voice comes back to them, crisp and clear. “They’ve had some success planting fiberoptic pickups on the outside windows. Video quality isn’t great, but I’ve managed to clean it up.” Video feeds pop up in their vision, along with a layout of each of the school’s floors. Simple animated graphics illustrate where the terrorists are holed up, and their projected patrol paths. Two dots, total, but that’s only the terrorists that have been seen and tagged so far. There could be more.

The video surveillance confirms the weapons the terrorists are using — prewar H&K MP5s. 9mm. They used to be the gold standard for hostage rescue and counterterror work, and their ubiquity means that intelligence won’t be able to pin down these terrorists’ origins based on what they’re armed with. Standard 9mm sidearms in hip holsters, full-face masks. Their movement and body language says _military_ to Proto. These are professionals they’re dealing with, which is simultaneously a good and a bad thing. 

Professionals aren’t likely to panic. If the hostages are mostly for show, to hide another objective, they’re probably going to get out alive. But professionals also aren’t likely to make mistakes, which means there will be fewer vulnerabilities for the team to exploit. 

“Do they not have information on where the hostages are?” Batou asks after a moment’s assessment.

“We don’t see them in the classrooms or hallways,” Ishikawa says in reply. “There’s a good chance the terrorists have them held in one of the media rooms. Smart choice, if that’s the case. Only two doors in or out, no windows for direct visual confirmation, no clear line of fire, plus adjoining storerooms with only one way in.”

The floor plans indicate that the school has two of those set up: one audio-visual theatre with top-of-the-line projection and sound equipment for video lectures, and a small, traditional theatre for recitals and performances. It would be far more convenient for the Section 9 team if the hostages were held in the audio-visual theatre accessed from the fourth floor of the main school building; the theatre beneath is a much trickier prospect, given the consideration of backstage and under-stage access and the kinds of ambushes one could set up with access to such spaces. 

“Paz, Azuma,” the Major says, after a few moments of thought, “go and tap into the school’s AV equipment and see if you can get confirmation of the hostages’ locations. I’d send Proto and his magic multitool, but I have something else in mind for him. Proto, Batou, Borma, with me. Stand by.”

“Roger that.” Proto’s unofficial specialty is getting into networks he shouldn’t be allowed into. Old school physical hacking and social engineering, that is, as opposed to software cracking or cyberbrain hacking, which are Ishikawa’s and the Major’s specialties respectively. But the field officers of Section 9 are all extensively cross-trained. It’s obvious what the Major is thinking. Proto, Batou, and Borma are, besides the Major, the team’s most synthetic team members. They’re the most likely to shrug off being shot. 

“Major, we hit paydirt,” Azuma says over their encrypted comms channel fifteen minutes later, “both the theatre and the AV room have recording equipment we could hijack, we just needed a wired connection to get to it. Sending visual.” A video pops up in Proto’s field of vision as he waits under the pale winter sun, a high quality feed this time, and Ishikawa is already working his magic, tagging the hostages and bringing up their information, wherever possible. 

“They’re in the theatre, damn,” Batou says, echoing Proto’s thoughts as he glances over the scene. “One of those terrorists could get on the stage and spray them all with shots from where he’s standing.” The kids are huddled in the audience seats, with their wrists zip-tied behind them. He picks out Mana Tanaka Hughes in one of the front seats, her face blotchy and bruised, smeared with tears and snot and blood. Someone has struck her hard enough to split her upper lip and bloody her nose. The hostages are all collectively too spread out for anyone in Section 9 to shield adequately, even if they did have Tachikoma support. One terrorist paces the back of the room where the doors into the theatre lead — the other one is standing on stage, watching. Waiting. 

“Major, I’m cross-referencing what IDs I can get with the list of kids and teachers who didn’t get out,” Ishikawa says over comms. “Taking the Tanaka girl’s video into account we can scratch off one of the teachers, Delphine Simon. French national, teaches French and geography, here on a work visa. We’ve got one more hostage unaccounted for.”

The picture of a teenage boy comes up, along with a dossier assembled hastily by Ishikawa, and Proto gives it a quick scan. It’s almost empty, which makes him do a double-take. You’d be hard-pressed to find a teenager who wasn’t glued constantly to social media in the year 2033. Talk show hosts and op/ed writers complain about how this new generation is going to be unable to communicate vocally considering how much time they spend in virtual arenas, but they’ve been complaining about this since the 2000s. All Section 9 has been able to dig up on the kid is that his name is Chris Fletcher, a dual citizen of Japan and the American Empire. His single, wealthy mother Misaki Fletcher works as a high-level executive at Hanka Precision Instruments, liaising with their cross-Pacific subsidiaries. He’s doing all right in school, in a way that says he’s just doing the bare minimum to get by. Wealth doesn’t buy happiness, it seems. 

“Something’s strange about this kid, Major,” Proto says, immediately searching for information on Misaki Fletcher. “There isn’t enough information about him. Normally you can’t get them to stay off cyberspace. I’m following up on his mother.”

“Do that,” Kusanagi replies. “Ishikawa, coordinate with Proto, see what you two can knock loose.”

Misaki Fletcher, at least, is much less of a tabula rasa than her son is — the first things that pop up are English-language news reports about her drawn-out, acrimonious divorce from her ex-husband, four-star American Empire general Edward McRaven Turner. Proto is well aware of Japanese governmental policies towards half-Japanese children, and their tendency to award custody to native Japanese relatives rather than their foreign parents, something that Misaki Fletcher has clearly exploited. “It says here that his mother has refused to share custody of him since he was three, and she brought him to Japan to facilitate that arrangement. She’s a dual citizen too, so she got away with it,” he explains to the rest of the team.

“That said,” Togusa comments, “I feel as though it would be a bit extreme to dispatch a black ops team to perform a non-custodial kidnapping, even if it’s a son he hasn’t seen in ten years. I don’t think the father is behind it.”

“No, it’s too stupid and obvious,” Batou says. “Which might mean he actually did it. These are the Imperial Americans after all.”

“No.” the Major says, hesitating briefly over the comm channel before she continues her previous thought. “General Turner has something of an interesting reputation. He’s a genius at asymmetrical warfare. There were rumors around the tail-end of WWIV that… he was pressing for a halt to the invasion effort because he was losing too many men to guerilla attacks. Some of the hawks promptly accused him of cowardice. The resulting media storm and psychological stress destroyed his marriage.”

“History has vindicated him so far, however,” Proto says. 

“Thus far,” Ishikawa comments, “but I know for a fact there was an unsuccessful attempt on his life last year — reactionary elements within the American Empire. Not the first, either. Perps of the last attempt were embittered veterans who thought all the horrors they had experienced were for nothing.” 

“So this could be an attempt at striking at him through his son?” Batou asks.

“Quite possibly,” the Major muses wordlessly, “which doesn’t bode well for young Chris here. Saito. How are you doing with the visual curtain?”

Saito’s voice comes through the cybercomms. “Cracked it, but there aren’t any windows to shoot through, if they’re in the theatre.”

“Keep an eye on the school courtyard,” Major Kusanagi tells him. “Anyone wanting to leave the premises in a hurry will have to come through there.”

“Roger that,” Saito says.

“Togusa, Paz, Azuma, get your asses back here. Memorize the school theatre layout while you’re at it.”

Her order is acknowledged. “Ma’am.”  
—

The assault begins, silently and invisibly as Section 9’s operatives enter the school under the cover of optical camouflage. Major Kusanagi has split the team up into four two-man cells. Herself with Azuma, Batou and Borma, Paz and Proto, Togusa and Ishikawa, with Saito covering the school courtyard. The Major and Batou are sweeping the first and second floors before they take each of the second-floor entrances into the theatre, while Togusa and Ishikawa sweep the rest of the school building and neutralize any patrols they find. 

Paz and Proto have a slightly more interesting job. Both the school AV theatre and the traditional theatre are twice the height of the regular classrooms, to accommodate the stepped seating arrangement that allows an optimum view of what’s in front of each room. That’s a massive holoprojector setup in the AV room, and the stage, in the case of the theatre. The sound and lighting control booth for the stage is up under the AV room projector setup, and is accessed through the AV room itself. 

Sound booths, according to Section 9’s research on the school’s construction, have huge glass windows on the front wall through which the sound and lighting operators can see the stage. That means that a pair of operatives equipped with the right tools could infiltrate the AV room from the school HVAC system, access the control booth from the AV room, pry the glass soundlessly away, and insert from there. 

Paz is not equipped to make a landing from a two storey drop without significant physical consequences, which means it’s Proto’s job to leap through the front of the control booth window and kill or incapacitate the man on the stage. It’s a good thing Proto has absolutely no fear of heights, but it’s a trait common to combat androids and people with military-grade full body prosthetics — the Major herself has jumped from the 40th floor of a skyscraper and landed without taking much harm, on a previous occasion. The problem here, Proto knows, isn’t so much landing unscathed as much as distributing the force of his fall enough that he doesn’t crash through the wooden stage floor into the storage space below. Not before he neutralizes his opponent, that is. Fortunately, that itself presents an answer to the issue of breaking Proto’s fall.

“We’re just waiting on you, pretty boy,” the Major says over their cybercomms just as Paz pulls the pane of glass away from the front of the control booth. Proto, his camouflage still active, gives the stage a quick glance from his perch on top of the sound board. The calculations are instantaneous, his enhanced vision projecting the path of the man walking back and forth on stage, the exact amount of force he would need to apply to cross the 16.64m diagonal from the booth to the stage, the trajectory his body is going to have to take.

“Jumping in three,” Proto whispers soundlessly through his comm — he isn’t sure why he whispers when it’s nonverbal, but he does — “two. One.” At “one” he leaps out the control booth, the air whistling in his ears, past his face, just as the doors to the rear of the theatre burst inwards. There’s a suppressed three-round burst from Batou’s direction. The sound of the bullets hitting their target is louder than the actual cycling of the firearm itself, and the corpse hits the floor with a wet slap just as Proto lands knee-first on top of the armed terrorist on the stage. 

There’s a pain in his shin from it impacting the receiver of the SMG the man is carrying, but the momentum carries them both to the stage floor with a loud crack. “Target neutralized,” Batou says over comm as Proto’s opponent sags limply beneath him. He’s hit the floor in such a way that his mask has been knocked off, and blood begins to leak from the back of his head. Human, Proto’s augmented reality overlay says, cyberized, but not enough. Not dead yet. 

“Target neutralized,” Proto reports, just as he flips the unconscious man over and inserts a cyberbrain jammer into the port in his neck. That should keep him down, should he be fortunate enough to only be lightly injured, which is highly unlikely, given Proto’s 90 kilo body weight plus additional tacgear, besides. Mass times acceleration means Isaac Newton is the deadliest son-of-a-bitch in counterterror. Above him Paz, who isn’t augmented enough to make the jump without a very messy landing, is fast-roping into the theatre on a line anchored in the control booth. 

“Proto, you’re closer, sweep backstage, I’m coming to back you up,” the Major says, as she and Azuma begin sprinting down the steps leading down to the stage. “Batou, Borma, secure the hostages. Paz, get to the stage and secure that son of a bitch. Togusa, Ishikawa, come to the theatre once you’ve finished sweeping upstairs, give Batou and Borma some help.” Backstage is bare cement and concrete and cinder block, as utilitarian a place as can be, and Proto pulls at the SMG strapped close to his chest for his leap, toggling the quick-release on the sling so he can bring the weapon to bear and sweep the passage leading to the actor showers and dressing rooms. The lights are out, but his low-light vision kicks automatically on, paints everything in front of his sights ghostly green as he flips the select-fire switch from S to F.

His facial recognition program has already rung the cherries on the man he knocked unconscious — it’s bringing up a dossier that identifies the terrorist as former American Empire special forces, but Proto dismisses the notification for now, he needs his entire visual field to do his job. He passes the tid-bit off to the rest of the team with a thought, just as he turns the corner into the shower. 

One of the terrorists is kneeling outside one of the shower stalls, while another one covers the door. Proto isn’t sure it’s a good thing or a bad thing that his night vision sees only in values of green, when the one covering the door twitches. 

“He’s using IR vision,” Proto thinks in warning to the rest of the team, just as the man’s finger begins to squeeze down on the trigger of his MP5. His enhanced hearing picks up a small sound just before his audio dampeners automatically kick in to protect him — the sound of a young boy whimpering weakly in pain — and he knows the dark smear on the kneeling man’s forearm is blood. A child’s blood. 

Proto’s enhanced reflexes kick in as he dodges to the side, aims automatically at the standing terrorist as the first round grazes his cheek, and then a second, but there’s something gleaming in the kneeling man’s hand. A knife. In response to the threat directed at the hostage, Proto simply stops trying to move like a human, and exerts his full strength and speed. His artificial joints and muscles reconfigure themselves swiftly and uncomfortably, and he crouches unnaturally low, then springs past the doorway in an augmented leap, striking both the terrorists with significant force.

His opponents are both combat cyborgs, skilled and disciplined, though, and he does not possess sufficient body mass to knock them both over at once. The man beneath him remains alert enough to stab at him, while the other terrorist tries to aim a shot at his head. Proto feels the point of the knife slip between his ribs, the blade twisting to widen the wound channel, and he turns off his sense of pain. In response he uses the buttplate of his Seburo C26-A to crush the fallen man’s reinforced trachea with a vicious downward chop across his armored throat, before he raises it and fires two perfect shots point-blank upwards into his second opponent’s chin. 

Proto’s SMG cycles twice, the spent brass automatically going into a top-mounted catcher, and the top of the second man’s head explodes in a shower of gore, blood, hair, and brain matter splattering the walls, bone and metal fragments stuck in the mess. His corpse falls backwards, hitting the tiled floor with a low splat.

“Dressing rooms and backstage clear,” the Major’s voice rings out in Proto’s head. “Proto, report.”

“Two targets neutralized, shower room clear.” Proto reports, as he climbs back to his feet, properly human in posture and movement again. He reaches down to his left flank to find a knife handle sticking out of his tactical vest, just as the Major and Azuma arrive. One of them turns the lights on, and his eyes adjust automatically. Proto’s internal diagnostics tell him that the knife has hit something vital — a lung, actually, but the collapsing section has already sealed itself off and will reinflate once the hole in his side closes itself up. There’s some redundancy in his construction, so this minor loss of lung capacity is not going to slow him down at all. He braces mentally for the pain and winces, forgetting momentarily that he’s turned his pain sensors off, and pulls the knife out of his side before he turns his attention to the boy hanging upside down in the shower stall. “We have a hostage down. We’re going to need a medic,” Proto says over cybercomms to Major Kusanagi. “Azuma, give me a hand with him.”

Azuma reaches down and steadies the semiconscious boy in his broad arms as Proto uses the knife to cut his bonds, and together they lay him out on the cold tile floor. Proto leaves his safed SMG leaning against one of the stalls and then shrugs off his ruined tactical vest, using it to prop the kid’s feet up as Azuma begins applying direct pressure to a long, deep wound high in the boy’s belly that follows the anatomical midline. It looks as though they had begun to slit him open from stem to stern, but had been interrupted by Proto’s arrival on the scene.

“Dad?” the boy calls feebly out in English, in his state of disorientation and fear. 

“It’s okay,” Proto tells him, switching automatically to English. He glances down at the knife he left discarded in the blood-smeared shower stall, frowns at the prominent gut hook at its end. They were planning to gut the child like a dead deer while he still lived, send the footage to his father, and then exfiltrate the scene. Proto doesn’t have conclusive proof about this, only that this is what his analysis indicates as his cognition begins to put all the forensic clues together from everything that he’s seen.

“Shouldn’t you, you know?” Azuma gestures with a free hand at the trickle of white blood making its way down Proto’s black fatigues. 

“No,” Proto says, glancing over at his own internal diagnostics readout again. “I’m not that badly damaged. Hostage takes priority. Just keep applying pressure.” He’s losing blood at a steady rate but it will soon coagulate and form a self-sealing patch, and the micromachines and replacement cells in his blood will fix him up over time. He’ll probably need a top-up soon, though. That’s better than can be said for the boy, whose blood keeps seeping through the dressing Azuma has pressed over his belly wound.

The child shakes, shivering from shock and blood loss. His teeth chatter. “I’m cold,” the boy says, and Proto takes hold of his clammy hand in one of his to comfort him, murmurs reassurances at him in English before he gets another field dressing out and lays it over the one Azuma has applied, presses down with his other hand. His own artificial blood mingles with the boy’s own, both fluids forming streaks in red and white and pink as they run down the drain.

“Medics en route, Major,” Saito reports from his perch on the school roof. “They just entered the front door.” 

The Major kneels down beside them then, pulling a cable from a panel in the back of her neck, and she plugs herself into the boy’s cyberbrain. Her eyes go distant, unfocused, and Proto knows exactly what she’s doing. She’s taking a record from the boy’s memories in case he doesn’t make it, so they have something to go on in their investigations. It’s a hard thought, but a necessary one. 

—

Batou lets out a low whistle as Proto steps out of the school building after the medics’ departure, to rejoin the rest of the team in the courtyard. The sun is still pale and bright overhead, but then the entire op took less than twenty minutes from end to end. “Who was that you were calling ‘Pretty boy’ earlier, Major?” he asks, shooting Proto a significant look. “Because our resident pretty boy doesn’t look so pretty right now.” 

Proto has had a glance at himself in the full-length mirrors in the showers, on the way out. He does look like absolute hell. A couple close shots have laid his cheek open to the titanium of his skull, partially exposing the workings of his face, and he’s smeared and splattered with blood, both his and others’ alike. A ghastly sight, no doubt.

“Shit, Proto, you got banged up,” Togusa mutters. He’s got an open bottle of water in his hand, but he passes it over to Proto without taking a swig. “You now look like a killer robot from a horror movie.”

“I do,” Proto agrees. He hands his SMG over to Batou, and takes the bottle of water from Togusa, and then pours it over his face and hands, washing the worst of the blood off. The water feels good, despite the stinging of his fresh facial wounds, which he feels fully, since he’s started letting himself hurt again. The wound in his side pains him more, and constantly, but has stopped bleeding already. “No structural damage, though. It’ll fill back in once I glue myself back together. Don’t know if we can say that about the boy, or the dead teacher.”

“Well, about that,” Batou says, “the medics think he’ll make it to hospital, so he’s probably not going to die in surgery. There wasn’t anything we could have done about the teacher in any event. I’d call this a win.” He hands Proto’s SMG back to him and takes the empty bottle, crushes it in his meaty hands, and tosses it towards a recycling bin. Someone passes another bottle of water over to Azuma, so he can rinse the boy’s blood off his hands, and they all walk slowly off to the tiltrotor afterwards, as a team.

In the tiltrotor Proto puts his SMG down and strips off his gloves, unzips his jumpsuit to leave the top half hanging around his narrow waist like a partially shed skin, before he yanks his ripped, blood-sticky undershirt up and over his head. He scrubs his hands down with a disinfectant wipe before he picks up a small repair kit and pops it open. He cleans himself up with more wipes, and then glues the gashes in his face and side shut with a proprietary glue, using the mirror on the inside of the kit’s box lid to orient himself. His synthetic skin responds to the glue application, the lips of each wound pulling automatically together to form a faint, raised scar that will be gone in an hour or so. The repair kit then goes back into a storage bin, and he sits down and waits for takeoff. 

Proto’s internal diagnostics indicate that his energy cells are at 30 percent, and that he’s low on blood, and to speed up the recharging process he closes his eyes and leans back in his seat, switches his body to low-power use mode. His mind remains alert and awake in this state, and he uses the time to organize his analyses of the scene and the data he’s dug up on the terrorist he recognized, uploads it to Section 9 servers while they fly back to HQ. He also copies over his memories from the relevant 17 minutes and 37 seconds of the raid, attaching real-time telemetry from his sensor readouts so that Section 9 can use that information to gauge and assess his performance. 

This is not typical of his body’s usual power draw. Unlike mass market androids, Proto converts food into bioenergy instead of taking a charge from a power socket in the wall. That was a design decision by his creators to make him as close to human as possible, and also to free him up to operate outside areas with easily-accessible power infrastructure. This design decision does come with costs — it takes time for him to recharge himself fully from the food he eats, and he doesn’t have as much raw power to exert on performance as a typical android or a full conversion cyborg would. 

Proto’s enhanced strength, reflexes, and agility, all those things come with commensurate demands on his power reserves, which is why he prefers for the most part to move and function at human limits. It’s not as though he doesn’t have quick ways to recharge himself, though. He keeps a couple bottles of very pure grain alcohol in his locker at Section 9, not so much for personal enjoyment, as he is incapable of getting drunk, as much as for swift and efficient conversion to power when he really needs to keep moving. It does also mean he never, ever loses any drinking games, but his sense of fair play also doesn’t allow him to exploit it much. 

Pure alcohol doesn’t taste very good, however, and Proto’s biosynthetic metabolism also requires nutrients to function, which is why he can’t just subsist indefinitely on cocktails, as stylish as that might be. So he eats, like any other person might. The ride back to the HQ passes swiftly, and he opens his eyes just as he feels the tiltrotor land. They’re back. Time to stow his gear in the armory, then a shower and a change of clothes before the debriefing, and perhaps a bite to eat after. This is, Proto realizes, the first time he’s actually felt weary in some weeks, but it’s not a bad feeling. It’s just a reminder that his body has limits.

—

Chief Aramaki is waiting for the team in the briefing room as they file in, fresh from the locker rooms, one by one. Proto walks up to his usual seat, and almost nobody bats an eyelash as he pops an IV bag full of synthetic blood and hangs it from a hook he’s placed high up on the wall for this very purpose, in anticipation of this need. Debriefings require him to sit still for long periods of time, which means they’re the perfect time for him to top himself up if he’s low on blood. He rolls his left sleeve up and swabs the skin on the inside of his forearm with an iodine swab, and feeds an 16ga cannula into the IV port implanted there. Then he rips a piece of surgical tape off a roll one-handed, using his teeth, and plucks the tape from his mouth, uses it to secure the IV line so it won’t move around or fall out when he gestures. 

An android Operator passes cups of tea and mugs of coffee around as Section 9’s field officers settle themselves at their accustomed spots around the briefing table. Proto accepts a cup of coffee, made very milky and sweet, thanks the Operator, and takes a first sip before he connects the IV line to the cannula and opens the valve. Proto’s systems register the inflow of blood and nourishment instantly, and he leans back in his chair and sighs quietly in contentment as a pleasant sensation of warmth begins to fill his veins and belly alike. His regeneration accelerates itself with the fresh infusion of micromachines and engineered cells, and he glances at his internal diagnostics briefly, then dismisses the screen. 

Azuma, sitting directly across from Proto near the Chief’s end of the table, is — well, he’s not quite staring, it’s not that rude and direct a look. But he looks a bit perturbed, which makes sense, because Proto has never done this in front of the collective team before. The veterans just happen to be jaded and blasé enough about his nature that they don’t care. “You were briefed on what I am when I joined the team,” Proto murmurs quietly to Azuma, who averts his eyes immediately out of embarrassment. 

“Yeah,” Azuma says. His gaze goes everywhere — down at his hands, fingers cupped around his teacup, to his left and right, before settling on Proto’s face again. “I know you’re a bioroid, I just — you look so human, and act so human, it’s something that didn’t really register for me until I saw you pull that knife out of your chest like I’d pull a splinter out of my thumb.”

Proto could react one of several ways. He’s spent a lot of time thinking about his relationship to humans, and what it means for his place in a society where his android cousins are thought of as largely expendable. But he didn’t expect it to sting so much to be told how well he was at performing humanity, when it was never a performance in the first place. Anger or hostility isn’t going to help here, though, and he puts that tiny resentment aside, chooses a conciliatory tone of voice. “And you saw me bleeding all over the place,” he says after another sip of coffee, “and that’s forced you to notice all the ways I’m not actually human. It’s unsettling for you, I understand, it’s the uncanny valley effect.” 

Some of Proto’s indignation must have shown through in his facial expression or in the tone of his voice, nevertheless, because Azuma looks instantly and genuinely apologetic. “Sorry, Proto. I don’t mean to be rude.”

That apology deserves an honest response. “Just don’t tell me it’s not going to make a difference and I’m just like a real human to you, because that would be insulting. I’m different, and that’s who and what I am.” Proto says that with a little shrug, to undercut the intensity of his feelings, so he won’t come across as confrontational or threatening. 

“Okay. Yeah,” Azuma says as he unpacks Proto’s statement, mulls it over. “Good job with those two terrorists in the shower room, by the way.”

Proto accepts the conversational olive branch, drains his coffee cup. “Thank you,” he says. 

It’s only after Proto has put his empty coffee cup down that he realizes that Togusa has been watching their conversation, listening intently, and he raises an eyebrow when Proto catches his gaze, shoots him a brief lopsided smile, just as Chief Aramaki clears his throat and begins the debriefing. 

“Firstly,” Chief Aramaki says, “I want to congratulate you all on a job well done. General Turner has contacted me off-the-record to thank us for saving his son’s life, and the Prime Minister is similarly grateful for us resolving the matter without any further hostage deaths.”

“I guess the General still cares about his son,” Batou says. “Must be hard to not have seen him in a decade, only to find out this happened. How’s the kid doing, Chief? Do you know?”

“Well, according to hospital staff Chris Fletcher’s injuries are serious but not life-threatening, thanks to Proto’s timely intervention. He’ll recover,” Chief Aramaki says. 

There’s a soft murmur of relief around the table. Section 9’s field officers are a hard group of people who do morally-questionable things in the name of state security, but saving lives is still the first priority for the team as a whole. 

“As for the other students,” the Chief continues, “they’re all traumatized to a greater or lesser degree, but mostly unscathed. Mana Tanaka Hughes will need a day or two under observation for her minor injuries, but she’s the only other casualty besides the teacher who was killed in the initial hostage-taking.”

“We ought to keep an eye on the girl,” Paz murmurs, to significant looks from the rest of the team. His reputation and habits as a ladies’ man have gotten him in large amounts of trouble before. “Not in that way, get your minds out of the gutter, she’s only 13. I’m a social deviant, I know, but even I have some ethics,” he chokes, after realizing what everyone else must be thinking. “No, I just think if she’s bright and bored enough to be hacking the school’s communications defense maze so she can post to social media in class, and brave enough to get a message out after seeing her teacher shot — she might have potential, just give her about a decade.”

“Somehow I don’t think her very rich parents will let her enlist or join the police after high school,” the Major says, with a small shrug. She’s been unusually quiet since she copied over the boy’s memories. Usually she’s the first to suggest celebrating a successful mission with drinks, usually at a very inappropriate choice of venue. 

“Yeah,” Paz concedes, “it was wishful thinking, I guess. She’s still got more spine than some so-called professionals have.”

“So what was this all about, then?” Borma asks Chief Aramaki. “An internal American Empire matter that spilled over onto us?” 

“In a manner of speaking,” the Major says. “The General’s divorce from his wife was all a front, done to misdirect, so Misaki could take their son to Japan for safekeeping, after the first attempt on their lives. He’s remained secretly in contact with them for the intervening decade. And Misaki Fletcher’s no fool, either. She had her son escorted by private security constantly, so the only time he was left relatively vulnerable was while he was at school.”

“All this pain and separation for essentially nothing,” Togusa says soberly. “I’m not sure if I could bring myself to do something like that.” Proto is fairly sure that Togusa would do anything to keep his family safe — he’s always been driven by a singular strength of will. But it’s a hard decision for a family man to contemplate, right until the choice has to be made.

“Not true,” Ishikawa shrugs. “It kept them safe for ten years, and placed his son in a position for us to intervene when this attempt was made. It’s still an impressive sacrifice, but it would be unfair to say it was for nothing.”

“Well, I hope I’m never placed in that position,” Togusa says with a heavy nod, to murmurs of agreement all around. The Section 9 team as a whole, Proto included, would take a very dim view of anyone trying to mess with Togusa, or his family, if only because they’re exactly the kind of people Section 9 was created to protect. Losing sight of people like them would mean that they had lost their collective way under the crushing cynicism of wetwork and realpolitik, which is all too real a risk, nowadays.

It’s another reason, Proto suspects, that he was created and programmed to have the stable, honorable personality he has, if only because a team made largely up of ruthless, jaded special operators needs someone — sometimes multiple someones — to remind them that a moral center exists for a reason. 

—

The debriefing ends with a general sense of frustration all around, if only because the Chief has ordered a halt into the investigation of the attack. It’s not anything anyone in Section 9 has done — no, it’s the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Public Security Section 6 muscling in once the terrorists were discovered to be from the American Empire. Proto understands entirely why Chief Aramaki is opting not to pursue the matter further. Section 9 has taken a significant loss in personnel with the loss of the Tachikomas a month ago, and this has led to deficits in their force-projection and investigation capabilities. 

Proto himself is an advanced AI, but he is still only one entity in a fairly limited body, and he can’t be everywhere at once. Kenbishi has assured Section 9 that their new tank platforms, the Uchikomas, will be completed by early March, but that is still two months to spend without adequate heavy weapons and armor coverage. 

Proto also understands his colleagues’ frustration at having had to risk their lives in the hostage rescue op, and then having had the investigation and eventual credit for its resolution plucked out of their hands by a rival agency, and so he does not comment when he hears the Major comment about drowning her sorrows in a nude bar, from the hallway outside. There’s nobody three-letter-agencies hate more than each other, so the American saying goes, and that applies in Japan as well.

Proto lingers in his chair, waiting for the IV bag to empty, and he and the Chief are the only people left in the briefing room, when the Chief speaks up again. “You’re almost done there, aren’t you, Proto?”

Proto glances at the IV bag, and internally at his diagnostic panel, nods. “Yes, sir.” He’s almost full up. He usually gets topped up at his fortnightly maintenance sessions, but his next session is ten days away, and he had lost a lot of blood in the hostage rescue op, which is why he had stuck a sticky-backed hook to the wall of the briefing room on his permanent promotion to field officer a month ago. It’s a good improvised IV stand. 

“You’re the only one in the field team who doesn’t have a police or military background,” Chief Aramaki says, “but you performed very well today.” Proto knows exactly what the Chief is tiptoeing verbally around. 

“I killed two people today, and injured a third, yes,” Proto says in reply. “That’s something I’ve never done before.” He may not have had a background as a soldier or a police officer, no, but he was built as military equipment. That counts for more than just experience, he thinks, but does not say.

“Without hesitation, either,” the Chief comments. “Does it bother you?”

“No, sir,” Proto says. “The boy’s life was at stake.” 

“Yes. A straightforward, clear-cut situation.” 

“Yes, sir. I’m sure there will be future occasions where it won’t be so simple.” Proto knows what the Chief is getting at. Lacking hardcoded imperatives, like a less-advanced AI would have, Proto’s cognition is informed largely by values and preferences instead, much like a human being’s decision-making is. The decision to use lethal force, in this case, was informed by mission parameters. Neutralize the terrorists, save the hostages. But the swiftness and violence of Proto’s actions was driven also by a powerful sense of the boy’s suffering, and he knows that he will one day have to temper that emotional drive and restrain it, should it conflict with orders. Life is complicated.

The Chief nods. “I’ve reviewed your report on the android mutilations, incidentally,” he says after a few moments of silence. There’s been a rash of android murders in Niihama City in the past few months. Not that murder is the right description, since the destruction of an android is classified legally as destruction of property. Androids are not people under Japanese law. “You don’t think it’s just vandalism.”

“No, sir,” Proto says. He has articulated his theory and concerns in his report, that serial killers have been known to start on animals before they move on to human targets, and that this could be an outgrowth of a similar behavioral pattern. There’s a consistency to the victims, too, that speaks of a specific methodology instead of just random destruction. All the androids destroyed in this fashion have presented as male, and were all found with components of their bodies missing, like trophies taken from big game. A head, a pair of feet. Arms. Shins. Internals. But these are all things that the Chief knows already from his report, and Proto does not repeat himself. 

“Very well, you have my permission to follow up as you see fit,” the Chief says. “I suggest you begin tomorrow, however. Your colleagues are waiting for you.” 

“Yes, sir.” Proto glances at his internal diagnostics read, and reaches over to shut the valve on the IV line. He’s done, and so is the Chief.

Chief Aramaki stands slowly up to leave, but hesitates for just a moment. “Be careful, Proto,” he says, on his way out to the door. “We would hate to lose you again.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you,” Proto says. 

—

It’s lively, a little rowdy in the staff break room, when Proto arrives after his talk with Chief Aramaki. “Okay,” Batou says, tallying votes up on a communal whiteboard. “Four votes for nude bar. Four votes for ordering in. Proto, you’re just in time to break the tie.”

“Aw. Order in it is,” Paz sighs, before Proto has even had the chance to say anything. “Hey, Batou, shouldn’t the Major have two votes, seeing as she’s our CO and all?”

“Well, that would also give me two votes,” Batou says, “seeing as I’m operational second-in-command. We’d cancel each other out. But Proto hasn’t even voted yet.” Proto knows where Batou’s votes have gone. For his boisterous, jocular façade he’s a thoughtful, contemplative man deep down, and he generally likes to spend his evenings at home with his dog, Gabriel, listening to jazz music.

“I’m amused that you’ve already assumed I wouldn’t be interested in going to a nude bar, before I’ve even stated my preference on the matter,” Proto says to the room in general. 

“Well, you’ve never really struck me as —” Paz stops short, reconsidering his word choice. “Shit, I’m sorry if this sounds rude, but you just don’t strike me as a sexual kind of person.” This, Proto thinks, is a fair assessment. He is not interested in sexual matters at the present time. But he also thinks he should have a little fun with his answer.

“I can, you know,” Proto says with a flirtatious glance in Paz’s direction. It’s all your posture and how you hold your gaze. He shifts his weight to one foot, standing more casually, and lowers his eyelids, emphasizing the length of his eyelashes in a way that the Major’s demonstrated several times before. He’s perhaps enjoying his ability to keep a straight face more than is gracious, but it’s not as though anyone can see how much fun he’s having at this moment. 

Nobody says anything for ten seconds, then twenty. Thirty. “Okay, that’s an awkward silence,” Batou says after a minute has gone by, waggles his marker pen in the air. “Proto, you ready to cast your vote?”

“Yes,” Proto says, straightening back up, all business again. “I vote to order in.” Batou records Proto’s vote in the Order In column on the whiteboard. 5 to 4. 

“What’s the point of being able to if you don’t do anything with it?” Azuma blurts, suddenly, before he puts his hand up over his mouth. His ears begin to turn red, and then the rest of his face follows, a flush rising up his neck.

“What makes you think I don’t?” Proto asks. Now he’s really abusing his ability to remain expressionless, because he would be smiling like a misbehaving child if he allowed himself to show it.

“Okay,” the Major says, as she rises from her seat. “Let’s drop the intrusive personal questions before I have to preside over Section 9’s first HR complaints. We have voted, and the order in faction has won. Time to figure out what we want.” Batou hands the marker pen over to her and takes a seat, and she crosses over to the whiteboard and begins to wipe the previous columns off. “I welcome suggestions, gentlemen.”

In the end karaage wins. Everyone has spent a significant amount of energy on the hostage rescue mission, and crispy fried things sound like a hot, perfect, calorific mess for a bunch of hungry field officers on a midwinter day. As one of the two greenhorns, Proto gets sent down to collect their orders from the courier, who is waiting in the downstairs lobby of their disguised HQ. 

Azuma almost never gets sent on these food procurement side trips. It’s not a slight on Proto, nor an insult. It’s mostly because the other members of Section 9 very much appreciate that there are never any mix-ups when Proto hands out the food. No, they make Azuma search for blinker fluid and skyhooks instead. It’s an application of the right prank to the right person. Proto, with his permanent access to cyberspace and his technical training, can’t be fooled by a request to look for nonexistent parts for the agency tiltrotor. 

The elevator carries him downstairs to the lobby, staffed by a pair of Operators in civilian office clothes, instead of the office lady uniforms common to their siblings. They're a common enough sight in Niihama, android receptionists, and wouldn't be out of place in the kind of private security company that Section 9 purports to be, to those not in the know. The courier is standing at the counter waiting for him. Water drips off their raincoat, soaking into the damp carpet at their feet, and they look up as Proto steps out of the elevator. 

The courier, a woman underneath her wet rain gear, hands two large plastic bags packed with hot boxes of food over to Proto. “Your order, sir,” she says. 

“Thank you.” Proto takes the handles of both bags in his right hand, finding them warm and greasy to the touch, and retreats back towards the elevator lobby. The elevator he took down is still there, waiting for him and he steps in, turns around to punch a button left-handed. The doors slide shut, and he realizes, as they close completely, that the courier is still standing at the front desk, as the elevator lurches upwards.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Proto begins his investigation of the android mutilations, and is called out to examine a crime scene. In between he thinks entirely too much about Japanese society and his place in it. 
> 
> Content warning: Discussion of sexism.  
> Content warning: Discussion of homophobia.  
> Content warning: Discussion of racism.

Proto takes the subway home at rush hour as usual, to anonymize his movements — the Mazda RX-8 lives for now in the HQ’s underground parking garage, because his current apartment does not have parking space for renters. And frankly, he’s not entirely willing to park the Mazda where he lives. His apartment is in a slightly down-at-heel ward of Niihama City, and a pristine 2010 RX-8 sitting in a slightly down-at-heel ward of Niihama City tends to attract the wrong kind of attention, security modifications or no. It just happens to be a plausible home for someone living on the salary Proto’s cover identity did, completely separate from his former or current remuneration working as he does for Section 9.

Proto isn’t sentimental about cars the way Batou is. Batou refers to cars using feminine pronouns, and he also believes that they should be allowed to run free, driven by sympathetic owners (who happen to resemble Batou), instead of mouldering away in private garages. Proto thinks that Batou’s attitude towards cars is a lot of harmless but unfounded anthropomorphization. Cars are not sapient. They don’t have feelings, or temperaments due to a lack of intelligence, artificial or otherwise. Their qualities are solely because of their engineering and design. That doesn’t mean you can’t love your car, if you want to. It’s just unrealistic to expect it to love you back.

Proto’s superiors are sapient, however, and they would probably look dimly on him getting carjacked within the first year of his promotion, which is why he still uses public transport, at least until he finds another place to live. He stands packed up against other commuters who won’t meet his gaze. They’re all sealed off in their own worlds, snatching what privacy they can while pressed bodily against strangers, and he does not grudge them that. His thoughts return to the android mutilations and the data he’s found and organized on it. 

Tomorrow he will follow up with the Niihama PD, which means Togusa’s input is going to be essential — most cops are wary of people from governmental bureaus showing up to investigate something they’re already working on, for much the same reason Section 9’s field officers dislike their fellow agencies so much. It’s a jurisdictional pissing contest, and any crime that Section 9 plucks from the police means work wasted and a criminal they can’t take credit for apprehending. The files Proto has read on the mutilations hint that it’s not a high priority for the police, however, and they’re seeing these more as a series of annoyances, vandalism, rather than anything more serious. 

In which case they might actually let Proto have the case without too many complaints, so they can devote the manpower to more pressing concerns. 

—

Proto stops at a convenience store for dinner — he’s full up on grease after the afternoon’s karaage lunch, and he chooses oden instead, a warming winter staple referred to in the Kansai region, where Niihama City is, as Kanto-daki. Proto selects various kinds of tofu, fish cakes, simmered daikon and burdock root, and shirataki noodles, putting them into a takeaway bowl, and topping it up with dashi broth. The broth here is darker, more strongly-flavored than in the Kanto region, spiked with sweet-salty dark soya sauce.

It’s been said in various places that you can live your whole life out of a konbini — or convenience store — if you just happen to have a place to sleep and use the bathroom when you’re not physically in the store. Proto has run simulations for fun, and found it to be entirely true. You can pay your bills offline at a konbini, arrange for postage or delivery pick-up or drop-off, buy concert or bus tickets, or use the free Net access at one. They sell fresh and packaged food, toiletries, alcohol, periodicals and newspapers, and other sundries. And they’re often open 24 hours a day, staffed by androids. The small footprint of each konbini is offset with frequent deliveries of new stock — each konbini in present-day Niihama City is a tiny tribute to the triumph of logistics.

Proto’s apartment is a former Section 9 safehouse, and therefore larger than the “one-room mansions” closer to the city center, but not by much. The main luxury of his home is that there’s enough room for a convertible sofa bed beneath the loft he sleeps on, and that he has a kitchenette and bathroom, but it’s still only 27 square metres of space, total, just enough for two people to live in if they really, really like each other. It’s fortunate he doesn’t own much, not having had that much time to accrue belongings and cruft. There are upsides to having existed for only a year and a half. Besides the small apartments neighboring his means there aren’t any families with children living here, which means things tend to quiet down fairly early in the evening. 

Proto eats his dinner at his small desk, where there is a computer terminal for his use. It has gone unused in the year and a half he’s lived here, and his few interactions with it involve dusting and wiping. The oden is hot and soothing and savory, its various ingredients soaked in flavor after a long, slow simmering, and livened up with a good helping of fiery yellow mustard. He gives his desk a wipe-down after dinner, and rinses the takeaway bowl and utensils, separating them out into the appropriate trash bags. The bowl is recyclable, the bamboo chopsticks go into the burnables.

It’s not too late to make the phone call he’s been wanting to, so he does, dialing the number in his head as he stretches himself out full-length on the couch. He’s tall enough in comparison to the couch’s length that his feet stick out over the armrest on the other end, but he’s comfortable enough with his head and shoulders propped up on a thick cushion. The phone rings once, twice, once more, and is picked up. 

“Asuda,” the recipient says. 

“Hello, Father,” Proto says silently. “Good evening.” Dr. Asuda invented the neurochip that made Proto’s existence possible. He helped program Section 9’s late Tachikomas, and worked on Proto’s cognition himself. He is Proto’s father in all senses of the word save for the biological, hence the honorific. 

“Ah, Hajime,” Dr. Asuda says, his voice warming, “good evening. You’re doing well, I hope.” Dr. Asuda is the only insider who uses Proto’s legal name, largely because he was the one who gave it to him in the first place. Hajime, for beginnings, fundamentals, genesis, greatness, all suitable and auspicious kanji to name a prototype bioroid with. Proto prefers to write his name in katakana, for the ambiguity of meaning.

“Yes. I hope I’m not interrupting anything.” 

“No, I was just reading the paper. There’s quite a bit on the front pages and in the news programs, you know, about that attack on the international school. Ghastly. I wouldn’t suppose you know anything about it.”

Proto smiles mentally. Of course Dr. Asuda would ask. “No comment,” he says, which is all he can say, really. Section 9’s involvement in the hostage situation is still classified, which means the Niihama PD’s SWAT and hostage rescue team gets credit, again. It’s not the first time this has happened, and it won’t be the last. But it doesn’t take a lot for an insider to guess at Section 9’s involvement, either, and Dr. Asuda has worked enough with Section 9 to know the kinds of things they do, as a bureau. 

“Of course. Well, if you’re calling me, you must be safe, so I’m glad you weren’t badly hurt doing whatever you can’t tell me about.” 

“Thank you.” Proto turns his gaze from the underside of his loft to glance at his left, over his well-worn desk and computer terminal. “I called this evening because I have a couple questions about my own cognition. Things that I’ve been thinking about, and want to mull over with you.”

“I see.” 

“Firstly, Father, I’ve been finding myself at a loss to cope with the death of my … comrades, I guess.”

“The little ones?” That’s a fitting epithet for the Tachikomas, lethal walker tanks with the personalities of five-year-old geniuses. They too thought of Dr. Asuda as their biological father, although on a day to day basis Batou had far more influence over their personalities and development as a loving stepfather might. For his part Dr. Asuda sounds grieved, too, which comforts Proto in a perverse way, that at least he’s not wholly alone in his mourning. 

“Yes,” Proto says, “I miss them a lot. Sometimes I visit their hangar, and it hurts me to do so, on an emotional level. I go in, and it’s quiet and they’re not there, and it’s almost as though I just lost them all over again. And yet I keep returning despite the fact that it hurts. I’m worried that it could be the outgrowth of a maladaptive behavior pattern.” Proto remembers the morning of his promotion, his first day from hell. It had all started out so well. The Tachikomas had congratulated him, and Batou’s favorite had helped him tie his necktie, no mean trick when the Tachikomas only have three manipulator claws for fingers. They had all been so proud of him, and he of them.

Dr. Asuda remains silent for a few seconds, and Proto waits while he organizes his thoughts. “H-m. Well, Hajime, the only way to be sure is to have you come over to the lab at Harima, and have me check how you’re handling memory access right now, which is going to mean a more in-depth assessment than Dr. Kanazawa performs at your maintenance sessions. There’s an edge chance that it could be lingering damage from the attack barrier. I doubt so, however. I think what you’re going through is a perfectly normal expression of grief. We are all social creatures, and we take comfort in the presence of those we call our friends and family. The sounds and signs of their presence is something we grow accustomed to in time, and that absence — the silence after they’ve gone, is just too much. But even so, we seek out the places we associate with them, because it also triggers positive memories of them. When my mother became seriously ill for a brief time, the kitchen became too quiet and dreadful a place for me to visit, as a boy. I would go into it because it reminded me of her, miss her presence, and retreat. Fortunately for me, things returned to normal after she was discharged from the hospital, at least for another decade or two.” 

“Is that so?” Proto asks. He knows that Dr. Asuda’s mother sickened suddenly while the doctor himself was still in postgraduate school in Mannheim, Germany, and Dr. Asuda was unable to return to Japan in time to see her one last time. That thwarted grief is one of the reasons why Proto bears her last name. Iwasaki, for “the rocky peninsula”. He is in a way related to her, albeit not on a biochemical level, and the symmetry of the thought pleases him. 

“Yes,” Dr. Asuda says, his voice sharpening as his thoughts return to the present. “I suppose the relative intensity of your present distress could be because you have less lived experience to spread those feelings out across, and because your memories don’t fade with time. Your first memory will always be as crisp and as vivid as one you had made a few seconds ago. There are things we could do about that, but it might affect your efficiency.”

That makes sense. Proto likes having an eidetic memory. It makes him a better researcher and investigator, and it’s satisfying to pull out an academic paper read months ago and connect it to a current project in a fraction of the time a human reader might. “I understand.” 

“It’s your choice. You could also try to attenuate the intensity of those memories and feelings by giving yourself more things to think about. Drown them out, in a manner of speaking, but not wholly. Just occupy yourself enough that they eventually work themselves into a routine part of your operating parameters. I don’t recommend using your work as a distraction, however. That can lead to you relying so much on work that you forget to live.” This feels like a personal caution. Proto thinks of Dr. Asuda’s incredibly productive career, and senses under it the fault lines of old grief and loss, of a son escaping the reality of his mother’s untimely death. This is the sort of advice a father would give his own son, which touches Proto greatly. 

Proto mulls over the possible options outside of work. Alcohol doesn’t work on him, nor do most drugs, and that’s a bad way for people to go in either case. He’s not interested in exploring his sexuality right now, and part of him senses that using sex to escape his grief would be tantamount to treating his potential partners as means to an end, which feels incorrect to his personal sense of ethics. “I see,” he says, after having thought out the possible externalities. “Would picking up a hobby help?”

“It can and has helped others. I don’t see why not.”

“Thank you for your advice, Father. There’s one other thing.” 

“I’m listening.”

“Do you think that I could one day dream?” This is perhaps a self-indulgent question. A silly one, too, from what Proto knows about his own cognition. But he’s never afraid to ask Dr. Asuda questions, because they have always been taken seriously and with respect. “I was thinking about it the morning I was at Harima a month ago, when Dr. Kanazawa woke me up from hibernate mode. It was slightly uncomfortable to have that gap in my recorded memory. But humans sleep a third of their daily lives away. I wonder if I could, if I wanted to.” It seems nice to be able to just lie there and let his thoughts and memories ferment, to turn out something unexpected and new. Perhaps he’ll put himself in hibernate mode tonight, just to try unconsciousness out again, and set up an internal timer as an alarm clock. 

There’s another long pause, as Dr. Asuda thinks, and articulates himself. He has always been given to pensive silences in conversation. “It’s possible, I think, it would require some modeling on my end to see how it would fit with your existing data architecture. It might be an unsettling experience, however, because you’re designed to remain conscious unless you specifically choose not to be. None of your decisions are subconscious. You might either find dreaming particularly boring and pointless, or be unable to distinguish between dream input and waking input. And it’s all theoretical right now, in any event. I could run some simulations and code a process up, see how it might work for you. The issue is you stopped being a program, Hajime, and started being a person about the second day after you gained self-awareness, and going in and altering your base code is going to be like altering a tiny portion of a person’s Ghost. It could have unintended consequences for the rest of their personality, as it could yours.”

And now for the most important question he’ll ever ask his father, in his brief experience. “Would you say the Tachikomas had Ghosts, Father?” Proto asks, glad that he’s capable of controlling how much emotional expression he can employ in most moments. 

“What do you think? You’re in a sense their sibling, or cousin. What are your thoughts on that?” Dr. Asuda is not evading the question. No, it’s something he likes to do, to answer a question with another question, and make the asker think about the possibilities inherent to the potential answers. He does this most commonly with students and proteges, and Proto supposes that as an AI trained to think by Dr. Asuda himself, that he counts as both. 

This time it is Proto’s turn to hesitate, to take a few seconds to formulate his answer. He knows what he wants to say almost instantly. He just has to find the right words to articulate something so private and personal as his own death, even to the man who is his father. “When I realized they were crashing their satellite into the nuclear missile, I was sure they had Ghosts. I would still bet anything on it,” he says at last, his mental voice faltering slightly at the recollection. “And because my cognition is based on theirs, I knew that I too, had one, and that it was my Ghost’s whispers that gave me the courage to face my death alone.”

“There you have it,” Dr. Asuda says. “That’s your answer. You came to much the same conclusion I did, after I’d found out what they had done.”

“Thank you, Father.” 

“Now, it’s been nasty outside recently. You’ve been taking care of yourself, right?” Winter weather in Niihama City tends to be rainy as opposed to snowy, due to the warming effects of the bay, but midwinter brings frozen rain and slush to the mix, and the temperature dips below freezing on occasion, as it has this week. 

“You know I can’t catch a cold, Father,” Proto says. This is not something that only he experiences — Batou, for example, and the Major, don’t catch any illnesses either. It’s one of the benefits of having a full body prosthetic. “And I just had oden for dinner, with plenty of mustard.” The mustard to drive out any nonexistent chills that he might have caught. But also because he loves its fiery sting on his palate. 

“Well. You know, this foolish old man worries.” Proto knows that Dr. Asuda is smiling on the other end. “But oden sounds wonderful, I should have some tomorrow evening.” 

Their conversation shifts to more desultory matters, and Proto is left feeling comforted and a little less depressed after Dr. Asuda hangs up. Proto doesn’t really attach a vast amount of importance to being a “real boy” as Pinocchio might. He is not human, and never will be. His cognitive experience was never meant to be a human one. But he also is human in many of the ways that matter — he is alive enough to grieve, has a human parent, and can bleed, feel pain, feel love, and die. Has in fact died once before, and is in no particular hurry to repeat the experience. It is what it is, and he is who he is, and he has absolutely no problems with that. 

—

Proto rises from his loft bed earlier than usual, when an internal alarm goes off. There isn’t enough clearance up there for him to sit fully upright, so he rolls over onto his side and pushes the covers aside, leaving the bed undone so it can air out, and finds his way down the loft ladder using his sense of touch. There’s no real point laying a real futon out on a narrow space such as a loft, if only because airing it out daily would be logistically difficult, so he sleeps on a foam mattress with Western-style sheets. A quick glance out of the sliding balcony door tells him that the weather is dismal, cold, wet, and gray, and he unfastens the tie on his nemaki as he steps into the bathroom to get ready for the day. 

It doesn’t usually take Proto that long to get ready, but he plans to go down to the PD and liaise with officers on the android mutilations, which means he wants to dress a little better than he usually does. His hair is fortunately quite amenable to being washed and then left alone to air-dry, despite its length, and he isn’t one to dawdle in the shower. Proto was given the option of facial hair when they created his body, but chose not to bother with any, so he doesn’t even need to take time to shave. 

In truth, his hair is only this long because the tissue sculptors who created his body wanted to give him the option of a variety of hairstyles. Proto just never settled on one in the first place. It’s an unorthodox decision even in 2032 Niihama City, especially given the amount of time he’s had to spend as Chief Aramaki’s aide. It’s certainly not business formal. He likes the sensation of it brushing against his back and shoulders when he moves, however, and suspects that he would feel oddly and unreasonably bereft if he got a haircut now.

Proto emerges from the bathroom naked, and steps up to the closet under his bed to select his clothes for the day, picks the only suitable options — his one surviving suit, in the glen plaid wool, a nice dress shirt in palest gray-green cotton, and a silk necktie in a champagne foulard print. He puts his various layers on, underwear and socks, an undershirt, the dress shirt and his trousers, before pausing to climb back up to the loft and make his bed. He also takes the time to retrieve his holstered sidearm. That done he climbs back down and stares in the mirrored door of his closet, at his own reflection, and the necktie draped around his neck. The silk is soft and heavy under his fingers, and he goes through the motions of the four-in-hand knot, settles his collar back around it, and sighs, reversing it. 

No, the Tachikomas were right. The Shelby knot really is a superior necktie knot. He flips his collar back up and turns the necktie over so its back is facing forwards, and reties it, but for some reason it doesn’t look as good as the one Batou’s pet Tachikoma tied for him a month ago. Perhaps he will improve with practice. There’s control software he could download to make the process effortless, but it feels wrong, somehow, in the face of that memory. So he settles for his slightly crooked, dimple-less necktie knot and pulls his shoulder holster on over his shirt. The waistcoat feels excessively formal, despite the miserable weather. Proto is aiming to look businesslike, not like a dandy, despite his personal tastes, and therefore he goes with just the coat.

Breakfast is a meal bar formulated specifically for highly cyberized people, washed down with water. Proto’s construction is similar enough to that of a full-body prosthetic that regular food doesn’t address all of his nutritional and energy needs. For that he requires supplementation. It’s largely an issue of raw calories — efficient as his synthetic metabolism is, it still requires far more energy than an unmodified human body to keep going, especially because it’s also constantly charging bioelectric cells that serve as a reserve of power for situations where he has to function above the human norm. 

Proto puts his coat on after he’s eaten, drags his rain jacket over that, and grabs for the umbrella he keeps by the front door. It takes him a moment to slip his feet into dress boots and zip up the sides, and then it’s time to walk to the train station, take the train to work, and from there, have a chat with Togusa about talking to the police. 

—

“So how many speeding tickets did you have to make go away after the last time I rode with you?” Togusa asks Proto, as they pull out of Section 9’s parking garage in the silver-gray RX-8. 

“Four,” Proto replies, “and there was the cop who tried to chase us down on the highway.” That was a good afternoon, the day Dr. Kanazawa finally cleared Proto for discharge after his emergency repairs. He’s not going to go that fast today, however, because he’ll be driving in Niihama City traffic, which is generally glacial at rush hour and congested most of the rest of the time. 

“Yeah, that guy,” Togusa says, teasing lightly.” Whatever happened to his report?”

“It went away as well,” Proto says without betraying a hint of his amusement. “Unfortunate glitch, that.” Proto used an old access one of the Tachikomas had discovered to do that. They had used it last to trawl for data on the Individual Eleven case, and had done so undiscovered.

“So, just for the benefit of my continued good looks, you’re not going to pull that stunt again? Because I swear, I have more gray hairs than I did a month ago.” 

“I’m surprised you track how many you have. Do you count them?”

“I could feel them growing in, okay? Never should have doubted you were going to push this car to the very limit.” It’s funny Togusa is taking this tack in his banter, considering he was the one who suggested Proto test-drive the RX-8 in the first place. It’s a good car, if a little temperamental. 

“You ought to know, if there’s anyone who knows their vehicle’s exact limits, it would be a technician.” The main thing, Proto’s research and experience has indicated, is that you absolutely cannot treat a Wankel rotary engine like a regular piston engine. You have to drive an RX-8 differently from another model of car. That means treating it gently when the weather is cold, and only revving it up when the engine’s sufficiently warmed up. But then “revving it up” is a fundamentally different experience in a vehicle that redlines at 9000 rpm. It feels as though he’s driving a car that does not run on anything as base as gasoline, but rather, some kind of expensive alchemical reagent milked from living stars.

“Yeah, well, I know that now,” Togusa mutters, before he cracks a can of vending-machine coffee, and Proto smiles with quiet satisfaction as he downshifts to pass someone. The ridiculous torque he gets from the Wankel is helpful on slippery roads, and this car is an absolute joy to drive. “I’ve gone over your notes, by the way,” Togusa continues, after a couple swigs of coffee, “and while I’m not entirely sure you’ve got a case there, I’m also not about to tell you not to follow up based on your gut feeling. The Major says this thing about listening to the whispers of your Ghost, and she also thinks I’m kind of bad at it.”

“Would you say I was listening to mine?” Proto asks Togusa, conscious of the thin ice he’s on, conversationally. Togusa has never believed that the Tachikomas were more than machines, as far as he can tell. Maybe it’s different with Proto because he looks so human.

Togusa chooses to take another sip of his canned coffee before he answers. “You know, I don’t know, Proto. I don’t know at this point if you need to have a Ghost to be a person, and I don’t just mean in a legal sense. That question’s way above my pay grade, anyway. No, I don’t think it matters if you have one or not, not to me, because you’ve done things that tell me you’re someone I can trust with my life, and the lives of others.”

“That’s a fair answer,” Proto says as he brings the car down to a purring stop at a red light. Proto’s belief that he has a Ghost is an important one, but it’s also a personal one, an intimate one. It doesn’t really matter in the long run if others believe he has a Ghost, as long as they judge him by his actions and behavior rather than by what he is. 

“I’m not a philosopher, you know? Not like the Major and Batou are,” Togusa muses. Proto gives him a quick glance, but he’s looking out the passenger-side window of the RX-8, as rain runs in beads and rivulets down the glass. “I admit, I was wrong about the Tachikomas. They started out as just machines, but they had become far more than that by the time they sacrificed themselves a month ago.”

“Do you miss them?” Proto asks, but he knows the answer already. Everyone misses the Tachikomas. The light changes, and Proto puts his foot down on the accelerator, lightly, takes the car through the junction.

“Yeah.” Togusa sighs. “I mean, they used to annoy the heck out of me. I couldn’t imagine the point of giving tanks the personalities of badly-trained puppies. But I even miss the annoyance. I miss playing board games with them on slow days.”

Proto smiles faintly at the memory of those lazy afternoon chess games he used to play against the Tachikomas. “I’m always up for board games.” The nice thing about playing with them was that he held no inherent advantage over them the way he might against a human opponent, and thus didn’t have to handicap himself.

Togusa lifts his head from the headrest and turns to give Proto an interested glance. “Really?” he asks, “What do you like to play?”

“Well,” Proto muses, “it wouldn’t be fair for me to play anything that has been mathematically solved against a human opponent. Go is a good choice, though. It’s not something a machine intelligence can easily optimize.”

“Really?” Togusa nods, more to himself than to Proto. “We’ve got to set a board up one day, then. I’m not great at go, myself, but if you say it’s fair, it’ll be fair.”

—

The mood at the precinct HQ is brisk, businesslike, and Proto and Togusa are pointed rather casually to a meeting room, based on Togusa’s reputation with his former coworkers, that, and the recent joint hostage rescue op that Section 9 took over from the police. They’re offered coffee and tea by an android office worker while they wait, and Proto notes the full ashtrays at desks, as he looks through the blinds hung around the glass walls of the meeting room. 

“This might be a good sign,” Proto says to Togusa privately over their cybercomms. “If they’re busy enough that they might want to palm the investigation off on Section 9.” 

“I don’t think you’re going to get much of a fight, personally,” Togusa answers, as he takes a sip of his tea. “I don’t recognize the name of the detective who’s been asked to speak with us, so they’re probably new. Which means they’re probably seeing the mutilations as nuisance crimes.”

A young woman wearing a sober trouser suit steps in, bows, as Proto and Togusa rise from their seats to return the gesture. Her hair is sensibly short, almost boyish, and Proto notes her plain, unmanicured nails, the bitten-off hangnails around them. Stress, he thinks, she probably has to work twice as hard for half the recognition. She’s mostly organic, although Proto notices the tiny gold letters gleaming around her pupils. She’s had her eyes replaced with high-quality Swiss-made prosthetics, probably to make recording forensic data more convenient. 

“Good morning,” she says. “I’m Detective Izumi Aizawa. I understand you wish to discuss the recent incidents of android vandalism?” Togusa’s guess is on the money, from the timbre of her voice, and the slight hesitation in her speech patterns. She’s young, and slightly uncertain under her professionalism. This is probably her first run-in with any of the Public Security Bureaus. 

“Yes,” Proto says, introducing himself with his workname. “I am Hajime Iwasaki, and this is my colleague, Mr. Togusa. We’re from Public Security, Section 9.” At that he takes his ID from an inside pocket of his coat, and shows it to her, the badge gleaming against its leather wallet. He does this left-handed, because he draws his sidearm with his right hand most of the time, and it’s an old investigator’s trick — always keep your gun hand free. In reality he is neither right nor left handed, and he only favors his right hand out of convenience in a right-handed world. 

“I see,” Detective Aizawa says. She shifts the files she’s holding from one arm to the other and sits down, and Proto follows suit, Togusa as well. “Might I ask the reason for your inquiry into this matter?” 

“Yes,” says Proto. “I’ve noticed that these android mutilations go back to August, and are spaced two to three weeks apart. Forensic geography will have shown no common ward or neighborhood connecting them, although a large number of them take place in the nightlife district — that’s where you find android host bars and suchlike. Assessing the dates with algorithms turns up nothing, either — there’s no obvious date or time cycle, no lunar cycle synchronicity. It’s almost a series of random property destructions.”

“Except, of course, that the victims are all male androids, and destroyed with a similar M.O,” Detective Aizawa says, completing Proto’s thoughts. She puts the files down on the table before them and opens one, takes an envelope out, and spreads its contents out before them. A selection of handsome faces, most of them blandly so, staring emptily upwards like so many discarded dolls. 

“I’d like to take over this case and apply Section 9’s resources to the investigation, because I suspect that there might be a budding serial killer at work.” Detective Aizawa swallows, sighs, and Proto notes the microexpressions flitting across her face, as she glances outward into the bullpen where her colleagues work. She’s faced derision for her theories, he thinks, that and dismissiveness because of her gender.

“I’m glad you’re taking it seriously,” Aizawa says at last, her voice lowering slightly even though they can’t be heard from inside the meeting room, and there are only the three of them present. “If you asked any of my bosses, or my seniors in this precinct, they’ve been chalking it up to jealous husbands and boyfriends, or some kind of ‘gay matter’ — given that at least three of the victims were found outside of unlicensed brothels catering to such clientele — and my warnings that the killer might escalate to human targets have gone ignored.” Homophobia is still distressingly common in 2032, despite civil unions having been legal in Japan since 2020. The nonhuman nature of the victims would probably amplify that prejudice too, Proto thinks, and hides the urge to sigh aloud. 

“That’s bullshit,” Togusa says, frowning a little. “I confess, I don’t see the case in it that the two of you do, but that’s how you learn to detective in the first place, you follow up on small stuff to practice for the big cases.”

“Well, Mr. Togusa,” Detective Aizawa says, with remarkable restraint in her voice and facial expression, “let’s be brutally frank. I think everyone thinks I’m hysterical, or trying to inflate the importance of this case to pad out my accomplishments.”

“Yeah, well, that’s how the sausage gets made, plus politics,” Togusa says. Proto would be pinching the bridge of his nose if he were more expressive, if only because Togusa, being a straight man, is completely unaware of how privilege works in his favor. 

“Yes,” Aizawa says, with a hint of testiness, “but in this case because the mutilations have been classified as vandalism, there’s no forensic review except for a recording of the crime scene, no autopsy, since the destroyed androids don’t count as human remains, so we can’t get anything out of the technique the killer is using, they don’t even have the bodies stored. They’re just thrown out, like trash, and I can’t commandeer the forensics and technical resources to have proper investigations done.” That’s a shocking amount of negligence, and yet Proto is not surprised. Detective Aizawa’s coworkers don’t care about the cases at all, or what could happen to the wrong kind of people, if the killer does escalate to human targets. Which is, unfortunately, all too common in overworked police departments, and Niihama City’s PD has been quite stretched with all the security issues triggered by the CIS’s Individual Eleven virus, lately. 

“Then you’re not really taking a hit to your career if you hand this case over to us,” Togusa says. “Given the lack of support, I suspect you’re being set up as the fall guy in case things do escalate.” His thoughts seem to be running along the same lines as Proto’s, at least. 

Aizawa lets out a single, humorless laugh. “It’d free me up to go take care of something they think is appropriately important, you mean.” It pains Proto a bit to see so much bitterness in her face, and to hear it in her voice, but that’s something that happens to idealists, a lot, and she appears to be one.

“Well, yes, that too,” Togusa says. _Better for your career prospects, though,_ he does not say. 

Aizawa appears to have made up her mind. “You will pursue this to the end, right, Mr. Iwasaki, Mr. Togusa?” Her gaze passes from Proto’s face to Togusa’s, wordlessly demanding accountability from them both. She might never hear about this case again, depending on what Proto finds out. But nevertheless she needs to believe that justice will be done, if only because it’s what gets her through the night.

“Yes,” Proto says, with all the sincerity he can muster, and this is when he would curse his lack of emotional range, if he were given to the practice. Sincerity is not something he can mimic or pretend to have, by its very nature. 

“Then yes,” Detective Aizawa says. She gathers the photographs up and places them back in their envelope, and slides the sheaf of files across the table to Proto. “I place this matter in your hands, because mine have been tied the whole time. Please contact me if you need more information from me. And this.” She reaches into her jacket then, and passes a small storage device over to him as well. “It’s a copy of the crime scenes from my own records. I have a basic forensics suite installed.” Proto notes the feverish warmth of the device, from its proximity to her flesh, and considers the fact that she has been carrying these files in a storage stick outside of her work computer or her cyberbrain, unconnected to the net. 

Proto thinks again about how he made his speeding tickets disappear, and manages not to show any guilt. “Thank you very much, Detective Aizawa. I’ll follow up with you if the investigation permits,” he says instead, rising from his seat to signal that this meeting is over. 

“Thank you, Mr. Iwasaki.” She rises too, and so does Togusa, and they all bow. 

—

There’s a cop outside the precinct HQ with a lit cigarette in his hand, staring at the Mazda in its space in the parking lot, and he turns to look at Proto and Togusa as they approach. “Ah, shit, you’re the guys from Section 9,” he murmurs, half under his breath, as tiny, drizzly drops of mist blow in the wind. That’s all that’s left of the rain right now, but there’s also a sharpness in the wind that speaks of impending snow, or maybe sleet. 

“Can we help you?” Proto asks him, not really meaning it. It’s just that the man’s stare at the RX-8 is fraught with a strange longing, as though he were seeing an ex-girlfriend living a happy life with her new husband and wondering what went wrong.

“Funny story… this car looks exactly like one we brought in, you know, a few years ago.” The cherry on the cigarette flares brightly against the overcast sky and the shiny black surface of the wet parking lot. “It vanished from our impound yard a bit over a month ago.”

“Funny coincidence, that,” Togusa says with a cynically raised eyebrow. “Odd how, if you brought it in years ago, that it managed to stay in impound that long, without getting auctioned off to a parts seller.”

“Yeah,” the cop says. He takes another long drag on his cigarette, exhales into the wind, and then leaves them without another word. 

Proto opens the driver’s side door of the RX-8, and then pops the rear suicide door open so he can stow his umbrella and the files in the rear footwell and on top of the back seats respectively. He needs to acquire a satchel, or something else to carry such things in, and makes a note of it. “What are the odds of a car like this escaping the auctioneer for several years?” he asks Togusa, as he shuts the rear door and climbs into the driver’s seat. It’s a rhetorical question, really. 

“They bribed the impound guys, probably,” Togusa says as he shuts the passenger side door, “to leave the Mazda there so they could use her for joyrides and to impress chicks. It’s not an uncommon trick.” 

“To serve and protect?” Proto suggests, with no small amount of sarcasm. 

“Your tax dollars at work. And mine,” Togusa agrees. 

—

Fast as Proto’s cognition is, it still takes him the better part of the rest of the morning to go through the files that Detective Aizawa has given him. He had already set up a digital map on a monitor in his personal office, marking the location of each crime, and used that map to run a high-level forensic geography analysis. Now he tags each scene with more salient detail, building an information net that starts to resemble a skeleton simulation of Niihama City, like one of those stereotypical cork boards in movies where someone tries to track the details of a conspiracy theory with pins, string, photos, and newspaper clippings. 

Proto’s simulation can’t adequately capture the texture and feel of Niihama City, though. Most simulations genuinely can’t. Life everywhere trends towards chaos and entropy, clearing up niches for more life in the process. Weeds growing in cracks in sidewalks. Damp and splintering wood harboring mushrooms. Ants building their orderly tunnels under the surface of the soil. Simulations, with their emphasis on orderliness, with every fact and asset tagged, can only be a pale reflection of the real thing. No, what Proto’s simulation map is good for, is allowing him a point of view that being on the street won’t. From his office he can rotate the map and look down upon it, see whole neighborhoods in a single glance, navigate in ways that shoe leather can’t. But it’s no substitution for actual legwork. 

He’s halfway through Detective Aizawa’s forensics recordings, the storage unit plugged into a port in the nape of his neck, when there’s a thump at his open office door. Proto pauses the file, minimizes his own forensics program, and opens his eyes, looking up to find Batou filling the doorway with a pair of plastic bags in one brawny hand. 

“It’s way past lunchtime, greenhorn,” Batou says. Proto is a little embarrassed at that. He doesn’t often lose track of time, given that he has a clock built into his head that governs, among other things, the repeated cycles of his thoughts. 

“You’re right, Batou,” Proto says. He closes the forensics program and plucks the drive from where it sits, under his hair, places it on his desk. “You really didn’t have to go to the trouble of getting lunch for me. I’m sorry.”

“What makes you think this is for you?” Batou’s face splits in a brief, nasty grin, before he appropriates one of the chairs in Proto’s office, drops the bags on top of Proto’s L-shaped desk. “In all seriousness, nobody else here at Section 9 likes these sandwiches, not even the Major, and she’ll eat anything. You’re welcome to a couple if you can choke them down.” 

“Oh, those.” Proto’s heard about those ersatz egg salad sandwiches. They’re formulated for the nutritional and energy needs of cyborgs, and don’t quite taste right to someone who doesn’t have a full prosthetic body. It’s a Section 9 ritual at this point, for some unsuspecting field officer to grab one and take a bite, only to be disappointed. Proto pops the box and pulls one of the sandwiches out, takes a nonchalant bite. Not bad. But then the only thing separating him from a full body prosthetic cyborg is the fact that his braincase doesn’t hold a cyberbrain, and therefore those sandwiches are perfectly acceptable to him. Different from a genuine egg salad sandwich, but equally good. 

Batou plucks a can of green tea from the other bag on the desk, tosses it over to Proto, who makes the catch easily, and they sit and eat in mutual silence. “I worked a serial murder case, before you joined us.” 

“The Marco Amoretti case?” 

“Yeah. Nasty business, plus the CIA were trying to use me as a stalking horse.” 

Proto is about to say something in reply when someone calls him, and he puts up his hand to pause the conversation while he picks up. It’s one of the Operators at Section 9. “Sir,” she says, “I’m calling to advise you, as requested, that Niihama PD has just received a report on another android mutilation.”

“Give me the location,” Proto says, as he stands and drains his can of green tea, leaves his half-eaten sandwich on a paper napkin on his desk. That done, he turns to Batou. “I’m sorry I’ll have to cut this chat short. We just got a report on another case.” 

“Heading out?” Batou asks Proto. He’s finished his sandwich, and he gets up from his chair. 

“Yes.” Proto grabs at his rain jacket and his umbrella, brushes stray crumbs off his shirt front. 

Batou nods, leaving the half-empty box of sandwiches behind him. “I’ll ride along. You drive.” 

—

Tiny freezing balls of slush have begun to fall out of the sky as Proto puts the Mazda in park and gets out the driver’s side. An unmarked van parks behind Proto’s car shortly after. Those would be the techs from Section 9, who Proto has called up for forensics work. He can record a crime scene and do some basic analysis on his own, but for best results it’s better to rely on trained specialists, and this time they’re prepared to bring the body back to an analysis lab for an autopsy of sorts.

The car’s modified suspension shifts as Batou climbs out the passenger side, as the vehicle is no longer subject to the massive weight of his armored cyborg body. There are a few police officers present, maintaining a perimeter marked out with yellow crime scene tape, and a single, desultory crime-scene photographer. They let Batou and Proto pass once Proto flashes his Section 9 badge. It’s a sorry scene that meets his eyes. Creamy white blood has run into puddles of melted sleet, dripping in chalky streams into the storm drains underneath the city, and another android lies in an ungainly heap before him. This one has had the hands chopped rudely off with a blade of some sort, wires and support struts truncated crudely at mid-forearm. Proto pulls on a pair of latex gloves and crouches beside the body, using thumb and forefinger to draw the android’s sodden shirt collar back. 

There’s the cause of inactivation, a broad, nasty laceration across the nape of the neck. Proto knows from very personal experience that that’s where an android’s braincase links up to its synthetic body. It is, as in the case of a human in a full prosthetic body, an anatomical weak point, and injuries there lead to swift disability and incapacitation. He turns up the magnification on his vision to examine the wound, notes that it’s deeper on the right side, from his perspective, than the left. That’s the tailing effect — wounds inflicted by a right-handed person will be deeper on the right side of the body than the left, because of the way a blade moves through the wound channel. 

“That’s not a slicing or sawing motion,” Batou says, over Proto’s shoulder. He’s magnified his own vision, too. “Check out the ridges on either side of the spinal wiring, where the blade went through metal. No serrations, no little flakes of material left in the wound channel, but you can see parallel valleys above and below it. That’s a repeated chopping motion, I’d say a small hatchet, maybe a cleaver blade.” 

“I see it, yes,” Proto says. A drop of sleet lands on his scalp with a wet splat, and then another, and he frowns. Someone needs to set up a forensics tent to preserve crime scene details before this precipitation washes it all away, and as he stands, he notes to his relief that a Section 9 forensics technician has already brought the popup tent, and he steps aside so they can set it up. Instead, he goes up to the police officers who first came in to mark the crime scene. 

“Thank you very much for your swift response,” Proto tells them, as Batou confers with the section 9 techs. “Might I know who called this incident in?” Proto has the files on record, but it’s more polite to speak directly with the officers involved, instead of being high-handed about it. 

“Yeah,” one of the uniformed officers points to a konbini wedged in between an adult store and a shuttered bar, “Lady who runs the place found it lying there, and thought she’d found a body.” 

_She did,_ Proto doesn’t say, and he nods. “Thank you,” he says, and goes to speak with the witness, an elderly woman wrapped up in a padded hanten over a loose floral-print blouse and trousers. She’s standing under the awning at the door to her shop, while a single shop assistant — a teenage boy — waits idly at the counter. Proto thinks of the half-sandwich he’s left behind in his office, but pushes the thought aside. “Good afternoon, ma’am,” he says politely to her. “I’m Hajime Iwasaki. I’m investigating this case.”

“You’re from the police?” she asks, the words coming slow and querulous out of her mouth. There’s a distinct Chinese accent to her Japanese, which means she’s probably a naturalized refugee. The lack of android assistants at her shop is something Proto notes, as well as its miniscule size. This is probably a family-owned franchise, and they probably don’t have the capital to purchase androids, given its location in a “pink” district of town, associated with sex work and adult shops. She probably gets by staffing the place with family members who each don’t make the wages they should, but it’s an investment. What they save from operating costs and from scrimping on personal luxuries might be enough to send the teenager to a good university in a few years. 

“Public Security Section 9,” he says, politely showing her his ID. “I need to advise you that whatever you tell me right now is going to be recorded for our investigation.”

She sniffs briefly, wiping at her nose with a tissue, and nods, the wrinkles of her face crinkling in a sudden, unexpected smile. “That must make your job more convenient, being able to record whatever you see and hear.”

“It does,” Proto says, finding himself warming to her for no readily discernible reason.

“And it’s so nice for your people to send someone so young and cute to talk to me, too,” she says, a brief laugh dispelling the false air of coquetry she puts on for a second or two. 

“Ma’am,” Proto says, slightly sterner, but not much so. “If I could get your name.” 

“Yes. I’m Kokei Yo,” she says, and Proto notes that her name is a translation from the Chinese, instead of a transliteration straight to kana or gana, which is more common nowadays. “I run this small shop here, me and my daughter, that’s my grandson in there minding the till while I talk to you.” She glances at a scratched-up old watch on her wrist. “We usually don’t get many customers during the day, you know, maybe someone getting a drink or a snack on the way out of the place next door,” and she nods at the adult store to the left. “Sometimes the staff drop by and get more toilet paper, that sort of thing. Quiet people, they keep to themselves. Usually, we get our main rush of customers after the bar next door opens. Rougher customers there, the boys, but they’re always reliable business for a bottle of C.C. Lemon and a katsu bento, and I pay my protection money, so in a way they take care of us here when a drunk comes in and acts like he owns the place.” 

Proto knows “the boys” she’s referring to — yakuza from the local Korinkai, who are enmeshed in Niihama City’s vice and drug trades, as well as a few legal businesses such as real estate, used car sales, and in some cases, politics. They’re generally below Section 9’s general pay grade and purview up until some ambitious senior member tries something very stupid that succeeds, such as ghost-dubbing the mind of an overdosed Central American revolutionary into a succession of identical full body prosthetics made to replicate his comatose body. 

“So this is when I like to get my deliveries scheduled, right before the bar opens, because that’s when the boys get in, you know? They like to grab a quick bite before the customers arrive. And then after the boys it’s usually drunks from the bar, customers who have had their fill, and are getting something to eat afterwards, ward off a hangover. You know the type.” 

Proto does not, not in person, but it’s a stereotype. “I do,” he says. Her chattiness is a good thing. She’s giving Proto answers to questions he hasn’t asked yet. He glances at her, watching her shiver a little in her hanten, and nods towards the door of the konbini, that they’re standing beside. “Would it be more comfortable for you to continue talking inside?”

“Oh, yes, if that’s fine.” 

“That’s fine. I got called out here and missed my lunch, so I might as well buy one of those bentos you’re selling.” 

She beams. 

—

Proto has just finished taking Kokei Yo’s witness account, and is paying for his second lunch at the till, when she says something, just as she passes him the bag and the receipt. “You’re haafu, aren’t you? You talk like a native, and move like one, so you probably grew up here, but you’re ever so slightly foreign, just like me. From up north, maybe, Etorofu?”

This is not the first time someone has said something like this to Proto, and it’s obvious how this old lady came to her conclusion, with his pale coloration — he does plausibly look like the mixed-race descendant of ethnic Russian citizens in the Northern Islands, north of Hokkaido. “You could say that, yes, but I’m actually a native of Hyogo Prefecture,” he tells her. 

“Well, people move about, they do. My own family did. But you seem to have done well for yourself. Working for the government, you’re polite, well-dressed. I doubt anyone ever gives you trouble for standing out.”

No, they really don’t, not here in Niihama City, anyway. Caucasian features are still a prestige marker here because of all the American and European immigrants working in high-value industries. Proto suspects his reception would be rather chillier up in the Northern Islands, where he’s heard of gangs beating up ethnic Russian citizens based on their looks.

Something in Proto’s thoughts must have leaked onto his face, because Yo reaches out and pats his hand gently with one of hers, her palm cool, callused, rough. “It’s hard, I know. To never be at home in your homeland, because you’re never Japanese enough. But you hold on to what you’ve achieved, and never let anyone take it away from you.” 

Proto is touched and humbled by the kindness shown to him by this tiny old woman who lives on the margins of Japanese society, because that is all the room afforded her, this tiny little shop frequented by gangsters and drunks. 

“Thank you very much, madam,” Proto says, and they exchange formal bows just before he leaves the konbini. He’s going to need to fuel up, and Batou, too, because they’re going to talk to the Korinkai guys at the bar, next.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Proto looks deeper into the android mutilations, and talks to more interesting people. 
> 
> Content warning: Frank discussion of potentially exploitative sex work  
> Content warning: Frank discussion of non-Western queer identities  
> Content warning: Frank discussion of fetishes possible only in a science fiction setting.

The offices behind the main space of the bar are brightly lit, as Proto comes in the back door, Batou a step behind him, and the air is tinged with the distinctive smell of cigarette smoke circulated and recirculated in a HVAC system until it makes a nasty, homogenous fug that permeates everything; hair, clothes, skin. Proto does not smoke — he gets no benefit from it — and he does not find the smell of cigarette smoke a pleasant one. 

There’s a young man in a sport coat and garish silk shirt standing guard inside and Proto identifies his rank instantly. He’s a chinpira, a low-level trainee, if you will, being auditioned for further promotion up the ranks of the Korinkai. Organizationally they work as touts and bouncers, encouraging patrons to patronize Yakuza-owned businesses. They try to lure the young and attractive into working at Yakuza-owned host and hostess bars and massage parlors. A good chinpira lights cigarettes for his betters, cleans up the ashtrays in Yakuza-owned offices, pours tea as an office lady might, and might be rewarded with the responsibility of holding hot merchandise for his bosses before he graduates to footsoldier proper.

“Sorry, asshole,” Garish Shirt says with a casual glance at Proto’s long hair and immaculate suit, “we’re not hiring new call boys right now.” 

“Fortunately for you, you’re below my pay grade,” Proto tells him mildly and pleasantly, slipping his left hand into a coat pocket, to grab his badge and ID. “I’m here to speak to management.”

Batou, standing like a statue behind Proto’s shoulder, rocks his head to one side, and then another, as though limbering up in preparation to crumple the chinpira up into a compact ball of dislocated joints and broken bones before tossing him in a convenient trash receptacle. Before he can complete his display of intimidation, though, someone comes out of a nearby office, a middle-aged man in a very good suit. 

“Eiji, you idiot,” he roars at his flunky, “prefectural police can’t afford suits that nice, he’s probably Public Security.” Eiji, if that’s his name, goes a slightly unhealthy shade of gray under his spray tan. “Gentlemen, please, with me,” his boss says. 

“Thanks for the show of force,” Proto says soundlessly to Batou, over cybercomm.

“What makes you think it was a show?” Batou asks. He sounds amused by the situation, but then there aren’t that many people in Niihama City or elsewhere who can give him a hard time, and most of the ones who can are currently working at Section 9.

“It’s appreciated nevertheless,” says Proto in reply, as they step into the office. 

“You’re welcome.”

Proto takes the proffered seat, crosses his legs in a purposeful display of insouciance, while Batou chooses to lean against the wall beside Proto’s chair, facing the doorway. They’re not quite in good cop/bad cop mode yet, but are configuring themselves as the smart guy and the muscle, respectively. The dandy and the thug. 

The yakuza manager takes his own seat, all business now, as Proto slides his badge and ID wordlessly across the desk. There’s a bank of monitors behind the manager’s L-shaped desk, but it’s obvious that he’s receiving the feeds virtually via his prosthetic eyes, and does not need to see them directly. Androids are mopping the sticky bar floor one last time, just before customers come in, and a group of touts and bouncers are sitting out at one of the bar booths, eating bento lunches bought from Kokei Yo’s konbini next door.

A bartender — a human woman, most probably, not an android — is cutting lemons with surgical precision, preparing garnishes for the evening’s drinks before the first customers arrive. Proto’s fairly sure she’s human, if only because most androids aren’t flexible enough, programming-wise, to perform the myriad tasks required of a bartender, not without expensive aftermarket logic upgrades.

“Section 9, eh,” the boss says, after a glance at Proto’s ID, which he hands back with both hands, his manner deferential. “I apologize for that scene with Eiji. He needs to learn his manners. I’m Kasuga, I manage this place.” His dossier comes up in Proto’s augmented vision, and he gives it a quick look-over, brushes it away. Kasuga’s clearly a typical middle-ranking member of the Korinkai — savvy enough to not antagonize anyone from the Public Security bureaus if he can help it. “Can I offer you gentlemen drinks, maybe? Our bartender’s in, she can fix you something.” 

“No thank you,” Batou says, without turning to face Kasuga. 

“It wouldn’t do either of us any good,” Proto says. He leaves that statement out in the open, the implication that they are both so cyberized that they can sober up in mere seconds. There is also the suggestion of the physical unpleasantness that two military-grade combat cyborgs could hypothetically bring to bear, despite the fact that neither is armed with more than a 9mm Seburo M5 pistol each. It’s not so much a threat as much as an indirect way of laying one’s cards out on the table, a polite way of letting Kasuga know that state security is definitely taking this case over, despite the lackluster Niihama PD response. 

“I see. I guess someone’s getting serious about the mutilations.” Kasuga himself has good taste in tailors, Proto notes, he’s opted to balance his broad, fireplug physique with wide lapels that would look out-of-place on a slimmer man, and the bottom buttonhole on his waistcoat, left customarily unbuttoned, is sewn in crimson thread, instead of the charcoal gray silk finishing the other buttonholes on his suit. It’s a subtle touch, an artistic one against gray pinstripe wool, that Proto appreciates. 

“I am, yes. I can’t imagine this must be good for Korinkai business, Mr. Kasuga,” Proto says, as he tucks his ID back in his coat pocket. 

“No, it isn’t. We’ve had six android hosts cut apart at various businesses we own, this makes seven so far. The amount of custom work it takes to make a good host, the facial and hand sculpts, the logic upgrades, those cost, as you probably know.” Kasuga gives Proto a meaningful glance, one that evaluates the fine features of his face, the individually hand-rooted follicles of his hairline. That gaze tells Proto that Kasuga’s thoughts have gone exactly where he wanted them to, with that earlier implication of his high prosthetic percentage.

“You make that back in savings, I’m sure,” Proto says mildly, with a significant glance at the android staff wiping down tables and putting mops aside, on the monitors behind Kasuga. “They serve double duty as custodial staff, don’t need to sleep, and don’t need a salary.” 

“Yeah, but bars have tight overheads, especially host operations like these. If the punters come in tight-fisted and don’t order enough booze, you know.” What Kasuga is saying is true — which is also why this bar probably also offers the services of android sex dolls and human sex workers, under the table. Hence Eiji’s comment about hiring Proto as a call boy. 

That’s not really Section 9’s jurisdiction or mandate, though. They lack the manpower to tackle a full-size yakuza op like this one, and generally leave it to the vice squad instead. “I understand,” Proto says, reassuring. Bland. Which is something he’s very good at, given his general lack of affect. “I’m not really here to look at your books or inspect your business, though. I’m concerned mostly with the mutilations. So in the interests of solving the problem for your organization, could you tell me about the android we found deactivated outside? I’m fairly sure he was one of yours.”

“Yeah. That was Sho. I name’em, I don’t know why. Customers like it when they have personalities and identities, you know? But even if they didn’t I would still name ‘em. He’s a modified Toyota secretarial model. Custom face and hair, a bit more body work, aftermarket hands and personality enhancements. Some of the punters who come in, they have a thing for the clean-cut boy next door. People like predictability, you know? The cold tsundere who warms up, the slightly sadistic guy with glasses, the cute muscled himbo.” There’s a romance writer, Proto realizes, hidden behind Kasuga’s craggy face, because it appears that he understands the conventions of human attraction very well. “I got Sho because some of the female customers, they just want a shoulder to cry on, you know? To be frank, a lot of the women who come here, they work in the willow and water world themselves. Soapland girls or hostesses from all-meat clubs coming in on off nights. They want a harmless man, an unthreatening guy, who isn’t going to demand anything of them. It’s like a bit of emotional comfort, you know? Recharges them for the rest of the week. Male customers, they tend to be interested in the main affair, and not so much the personality.”

“I imagine the roleplay is part of the draw, though,” Proto muses aloud.

“Oh, yeah, like you wouldn’t believe, but usually when a man wants that with another man he goes to an okama bar, not so much a host bar like this.” Kasuga seems like a genuinely friendly guy, for a yakuza, but he’s mostly being this communicative because it’s better for business to have Section 9 take care of whoever’s mutilating their custom android sex workers, and also because the Korinkai as an organization have learned that trying to keep Section 9 out of their business is generally a painful and unprofitable proposition. “The male customers I tend to get are married guys sneaking around behind their wives. Men like that don’t want the complications that can come with a boyfriend or a hookup.” 

Proto is personally quite glad Batou came along this time, instead of say, Paz, Togusa, or Azuma. The current subject matter might make them uncomfortable. Not so much out of insecurity in Togusa’s case, but Togusa is also the most married man Proto has ever met. “What was Sho doing outside today?” he asks. “He wouldn’t need to eat or drink, so it’s not like he stepped out for lunch.”

“No, I sometimes send the bots out on errands when the boys are busy with other stuff, since their secretarial functions are all still intact. We’d just gotten a liquor delivery earlier today, so the boys were checking the goods, unstocking. You know, making sure we got enough bottles of the good stuff, because sometimes the distributor tries to screw you with more bottles of shit people don’t buy because other establishments will bribe them to get more of the popular liquors. And androids are pretty convenient, yeah, but they aren’t context smart enough to know when someone’s trying to pull a fast one.”

“Right.” That is unfortunately true: several of the Tachikomas got in trouble at Section 9 for using logic paradoxes to stymie Operator androids. It happened before Proto’s time, but it’s something he could employ if he felt like being mean-spirited. Which he generally does not.

Kasuga’s eyes narrow, focusing past Proto’s head, as he refers to an internal chore list on his augmented vision. “It was about two hours ago, lemme think — we were running low on toilet paper and wanted to get some before I sent one of the boys out to grab a big pack at one of the wholesale outlets, so I sent Sho to get some from Mrs. Yo next door. He doesn’t come back right away, but he’s always kind of chatty, something in his personality program, and I assume he’s shooting the shit with Mrs. Yo and then Eiji tells me the cops are pulling up outside. You guys came in the back door about 45 minutes after that.” That, according to the logs Proto has access to, is an accurate account of the timeline. 

“You don’t have security camera coverage outside?” Proto asks, although he already knows the answer to that question. A magician has two hands — one that tells you pretty, pretty lies of misdirection, while the other one does the real work of palming and passing and general legerdemain. Batou has been quietly hacking into the bar’s network while Proto has been distracting the management, and he is at this point doing the equivalent of holding the local Korinkai server upside-down by the ankles and shaking it until the candy comes out. 

“Not at the street front,” Kasuga says, completely unaware that Proto has already accessed most of the bar’s IR records via Batou’s efforts. “We cover the back door, but customers don’t really like being recorded coming into a place like this, you know? Inside it’s dim enough that we only have coverage in a few spots — the bar, that helps us deal with people harassing the human staff, a couple of high-money booths, because people who pay a lot think they can get away with a lot of stupid shit. And the rooms back here, so nobody tries to steal bottles of liquor from the stock, or run out without paying for services.”

“That makes sense,” Proto says, quietly avoiding any mention of the other video cameras Kasuga hasn’t talked about, the ones inside the rooms that clients use when they’re buying under-the-table services. “Mr. Kasuga, if I wanted to follow up with the other six cases that occurred around Korinkai businesses, would you be able to broker a meeting with the other managers?” This is a genuine question, if only because attempting to trawl through the extensive Korinkai network would require more AI hours than Section 9 has access to right now. The Tachikomas could have helped, were they still around, but they are not. It seems as though Proto misses them more every day.

“Well,” Kasuga hesitates then. “Some of my colleagues are pretty private, you know? But this is probably a bigger matter than we can see, given that Section 9’s involved. You people don’t chase small stuff. It’s like an iceberg.”

How astute. This man, Proto thinks, is probably headed for the upper echelons of the organization in a decade or two, given how smart and canny he is. Well, he’s certainly not the first yakuza boss to have a secret stash of girls’ romance manga in his personal storage folder (according to the files that Batou is covertly copying over to Section 9 servers), nor will he be the last. “We don’t, and yes, it is.”

“How’s about you give me your contact info, and I’ll discuss this with my superiors, and see if it’s kosher? I’ll give you a call back and tell you yes or no.” 

“That sounds fair.” Proto reaches for his card case, pulls out an official name card and hands it across the desk to Kasuga, receives his name card in return. “Incidentally, we’ll be taking Sho in as evidence, for forensic analysis.”

“Well,” Kasuga shrugs, just a little sadly, “he’s not going to be much use to anyone as he is. Saves us the trip to the e-waste disposal facility.” 

“Thank you.” Proto rises from his seat, looming for a moment over Kasuga, who stands half a minute later.

“Before you go, Mr. Iwasaki,” Kasuga asks, conspiratorially, “could you tell me, one man to another, who your face sculptor is?”

That brings a faint smile to Proto’s face. “I would,” he says, dissembling, “but I’m sorry. She doesn’t work for the general public.” 

“Ah, that’s a pity,” Kasuga says, grins just a bit nastily. “Some of our lady clients would probably love to have a nice chat with someone as pretty as you. The whole stern detective trope, you know.”

That elicits a snort from Batou, who levers himself off the wall, and follows silently in Proto’s wake. 

“You’re never going to let me live this down, are you?” Proto asks Batou over their cybercomms as they head back over to the forensic truck. The sleet has stopped, at least, but the air is still wet, heavy with moisture that threatens to shock-freeze in a rising wind. It’s going to be entertaining driving back to the HQ like this, mostly on account of the other Niihama City drivers who lack offensive and defensive driving training and seem to turn into complete morons once there’s any kind of ice on the road.

“Of course not.” Batou sounds entirely too pleased with himself. “Although it’s not like you chose your face, so I can’t really accuse you of vanity there.”

“No, the staff at Harima did,” Proto says. People only rarely comment on how he looks, most of the time. He notes their attraction mostly through the way they look at him, the small tells in their facial expressions as their gazes linger upon him, and he wonders why today is different. It’s the way he dressed, he thinks. 

A good suit accentuates a person’s build if their tailor is competent, but it also does several other things. The sharp V of the gorge line, where the lapels fold out, leads the gaze up the sumptuous silk of a necktie, to the face, and a well-chosen shirt highlights their skin tone and the color of their eyes and hair. The darts on the coat where the waist is suppressed slims the silhouette, and the flare of the coat’s vent accentuates the cycle of their walk. The creases down the trouser front, if present, lengthen the lines of the legs. It’s all very clever, how a well-tailored suit directs the gaze. 

“If it makes you uncomfortable to be hit on so much you can always ask them for a new one,” Batou says, ever practical, after having mistaken Proto’s thoughtful silence for discomfort.

Proto has thought about that, once or twice, while brushing his hair in the morning, usually while also pondering human aesthetic priorities. “I could, yes. But I think I’m fine with what I’ve got right now. Thank you for the assist on the hacking.” He’s a little reluctant to have his face changed right now, mostly because now he knows the story behind how he looks.

“And thank you for keeping Kasuga’s attention where it needed to be, instead of on his server. They have a lot of blackmail footage that I’m going to want eye bleach for.” 

The figure of speech amuses Proto, but it’d be particularly futile in Batou’s case, given his Ranger-issue prosthetic eyes. “Anything we should follow up on?”

“No,” Batou sighs mentally, “just politicians being perverts. News at 9.”

Proto thinks of the various politicians Section 9 have caught doing entertaining things like swapping their cyberbrains with android geisha, and decides to cut Batou a break. “I have a couple bottles of fairly high-proof alcohol in my locker, for emergencies,” he says. “Emergency fuel, that is, but if you ever feel the need…”

Batou’s mental voice sounds just a little bit wistful then. “I don’t think I can get drunk enough to forget what I saw any more. Plus my external memory.” Proto thinks back to his conversation with Dr. Asuda last evening, and how his own memory works, realizes that forgetting is sometimes a balm, and its loss is a price one pays when replacing fallible flesh with indefatigable steel and titanium. 

—

It’s a slow evening at Sawada’s, which is something Proto has been counting on as he steps under its awning and pulls his umbrella shut. It’s close to eight, about fifteen minutes before the shop closes, and Proto has just parked his Mazda two shops down, where he could find a free parking space. There aren’t many customers in the garment district this late on a miserable day, but there isn’t that much parking space here in the first place. A lot of the people who shop here can afford drivers, who can drop them off right at their destination, and then come back around to pick them up when the fitting is done. 

He’s here for two reasons. Section 9’s techs have finished combing the crime scene for clues and evidence, but there the rain and sleet have effectively washed the scene and the body down, destroying a lot of what could have been left. That leaves the android’s body as the only major piece of evidence remaining so far. Kasuga hasn’t contacted him yet about the Korinkai turning over what they know about the mutilations, and there are two crime scenes he has yet to check out. Both of those mutilations occurred in sections of Niihama city associated with gay nightlife, and in this aspect, Proto has no guide or mentor to show him the ropes. 

The Niihama PD information is incomplete on those two venues, but it isn’t Detective Aizawa’s fault. Rather, it’s the local queer community’s insistence on privacy, which means going in flashing his badge might not be a great idea. He needs to recruit an expert witness who might be willing to talk him through things he doesn’t know. 

The second reason Proto is here is that he needs to order a replacement for the suit he lost five weeks ago, shortly after he died in an unused office in the basement levels of the Diet building. Medics had cut it off of him to pack him in a cryobag, to minimize ischemia-related tissue damage until he could be transported safely to Harima for emergency repairs. His partially biological construction allows him to repair himself as long as he’s fed and topped up, but it does come with some inherent drawbacks. When his body does finally fail, failure is complete and catastrophic, possibly even fatal. Fortunately the neurochip his mind lives on is a little sturdier than even a cyberbrain, which is why he’s still presently around.

Proto shakes excess moisture from his umbrella before he steps in the door, and the bell hanging from the inside door handle rings softly, prompting someone within to say a muffled “Welcome,” before they even see him. A familiar face emerges from the curtains separating the front of the tailor’s shop from the workshop in the back — glasses, stylishly highlighted hair, and a mobile mouth that looks like it would smirk more if he weren’t currently on the clock. That’s Takumi, one of the apprentice tailors working here at Sawada’s. Proto has done his due diligence and performed a cursory background check on him before leaving the HQ for his drive down to the garment quarter. 

Full name Takumi Sawada, age 26. The younger of his father’s two sons, and the only one currently interested in running the family business. One younger sister. One failed attempt at a degree in graphic design. No criminal history, not even a speeding ticket, and a fairly uncomplicated personal life consisting mostly of app-guided hookups and occasional attempts at longer-term relationships. Utterly, quintessentially normal. Takumi waits at the counter, glancing at Proto from behind his glasses, appraising him and the way he looks in his suit. Well, that’s to be expected, considering the personal phone number on the name card Takumi slid across the countertop the first time Proto came in to order a pair of suits, months ago. 

“Good evening, Mr. Iwasaki,” Takumi says, with a bow and a grin that might be a little more familiar than absolutely polite. “I remember you. Here for another suit?” 

“Two, actually,” Proto says. “I’m afraid the chocolate-brown flannel is a loss.” Best to start with the bad news. He has read somewhere that a bespoke suit like that one takes at least 50 man-hours to complete, hence the cost. 

Takumi blinks once, raises an eyebrow, but does not ask.

“It’s absolutely nothing you’ve done,” Proto clarifies, “and I liked it very much. There just wasn’t very much of it left after I got hauled in for emergency —” and he almost says _repairs_ , but he’s dealing with a civilian here, “— surgery.” The buttonholes on that suit had been done with exquisite hand stitches, each one an individual work of art, and he still feels a vague pang of guilt at the thought of the suit having been cut apart with trauma shears.

Takumi averts his gaze briefly, his brow furrowing, before he puts his work face on again. “I’d ask what happened to you —” he says with a raised eyebrow, “and to it, but I get a feeling you can’t tell me.”

“I’m afraid not,” Proto says with a bitten-off half-laugh. He feels oddly self-conscious, if only because most people don’t get a bespoke suit only to have it destroyed on their first day of work. But then he isn’t most people, and a first day at Section 9 is not what one would call typical. 

Takumi shrugs Proto’s embarrassment off, reassuring, prosaic. “We get a lot of government workers here. Want a copy of the invoice so you can claim it as a work expense?” The way Takumi says “government workers” makes it clear that he’s referring to people who work state security, either for one of the other Public Safety Bureaus, or for other agencies, as opposed to the usual bureaucrats and politicians.

“And your other clients do this,” Proto says, thinking momentarily of his tax bill. It’s not something he’s upset about paying, but now he’s wondering about whether he’s fractionally subsidized any of the other suits he’s seen while acting as the Chief’s aide. He might actually feel a tiny bit insulted if that were the case, if only because of how dreadful they made their wearers look. Extravagance is nothing without taste.

Takumi lets out an unprofessional little burp of laughter at Proto’s naivete, before he manages to put the professional face on again. “All the time.”

“Then yes. Thank you.” Proto isn’t sure if he’s actually going to submit an expense claim to the Chief — Section 9 field officers get a generous expense stipend on top of their salary to cover things like clothing or vehicle damage incurred in a dangerous career of getting shot at, but it’s an amusing thought.

They go over fabrics again — Proto having assured Takumi that his measurements haven’t changed in the intervening months. Proto opts to have the chocolate-brown flannel remade, because he truly loves the fabric and the way the suit looked on him the one time he wore it. He doesn’t even have to pick the fabrics and buttons over again, since Sawada’s has the inventory numbers on file, on old-fashioned paper order forms, kept in one of the shop’s many file cabinets. Even the patterns for the two suits he has ordered have been kept intact, drawn and cut out onto smooth brown oaktag and stored hanging on a rack where all the customers’ patterns are kept. 

The second suit he orders is in a hand-woven Donegal tweed, an earthy herringbone weave flecked with green, blue, red, and gray. The mingled colors resolve to an optical blend that resembles the graybrown bark of a maple tree. That’s paired with a lining in a striped pistachio-green Bemberg and coffee-colored dyed corozo buttons. He opts again for patch pockets on this suit, matching the chocolate-brown one, and side vents on the coat, to make trouser pocket access easier. 

“Scottish and Irish tweeds can be a bit much in the summer, if you have to wear your coat all the time,” Takumi says, after Proto has made his selection of fabrics, “so if you want more options, you could come in just before the weather turns warmer and get yourself an odd jacket or two, maybe a sport coat, just to wear with your suit trousers instead of the tweed when it’s 90% humidity out there. We have some good Italian linens, and if you ask we can also order some handwoven matka silk from India. They’re not strictly speaking the kind of fabrics you want to wear to the Diet building, of course, but if you’re just going to your office they should be acceptably formal.”

“I’ll think about it,” Proto says, noticing that Takumi has quite cleverly not articulated why certain individuals, especially those who carry firearms on duty, would want to wear their coats all the time. It’s a good concealment option, and a stylish one, in any event. “I was going to ask you,” Proto says, speaking again as he signs the order form, “if you could give me some advice.”

“Sartorial advice? You don’t need it, really,” Takumi says. It looks like he’s resisting the urge to flirt. “You’re very stylish without overdoing it, and you have a really good eye for color and the way it works with your hair and skin. I like the tie you’re wearing today especially.” 

Proto starts to appreciate the potential advantages of being a gay tailor. Being attracted to men would mean you’re more invested in whatever they wear, and how it makes them look. He tries to find a polite way to segue into his real question, and fails. “No. I’m investigating a case and —” and Proto decides to just be direct, here, “I need someone to walk me through the city’s gay subcultures and nightlife.”

Takumi’s hand hovers motionless for ten seconds over the order form, before he pulls it back towards his side of the counter. “... So you want me to be your informer?” He doesn’t seem offended, just coolly curious.

Proto shakes his head. “Not so much an informant. More like an expert witness.”

“It’s a bit weird, coming from you, I mean,” Takumi looks up at Proto, his gaze truly direct now, not so much judging as much as just reassessing. “I assumed you couldn’t be entirely straight, because no straight man pays this much attention to what he’s wearing. But I guess you are.”

“I just haven’t figured out what I am, yet,” Proto says, which is the absolute truth. “But this is a professional request, and I can compensate you for your time.” 

“Probably not in the ways I’d really like you to,” and Takumi winks broadly at that, “but eh.” He shrugs, abandoning the attempt at a come-on. “You’ll at least take me out to dinner, right? Because if I’m going to tell you about personal stuff like that, I’d like to do so over a date.”

That provokes a brief half-laugh that comes out more like a huff. Proto isn’t entirely sure if he’s being joked at. “I was talking more about financial compensation.”

“Nah,” Takumi waves the offer off. “My dad pays me enough to get by. And I can find someone to sleep with easily. Someone to hang out and chat with who isn’t also a tailor, though? Not so easy. So are you in?”

That seems acceptable enough, as long as that’s all that happens. Proto is flattered by the attention, but personally unsure what he would do if things were to go further than that. “As long as it’s only a dinner date, yes.” 

“Don’t worry. You told me you haven’t figured things out, and that’s entirely fine with me. I’m not going to keep pushing you, or slip a roofie in your drink. Besides, that probably wouldn’t work, either. You guys tend to be highly cyberized people, which means you could probably turn me into a human pretzel without that much effort.”

That’s a surprisingly accurate guess given the incomplete information Takumi has to work with. “And how would you know that?” Proto asks, curious as to what guided the assumption.

Takumi shrugs. “Like I said, we get lots of government workers here. And here’s what really gives it away. You all never worry about your measurements changing, because they never do. It’s something I have to notice, you know. I mean, if you asked me right now if I could tell you were a cyborg without that knowledge, I’d kind of waver a bit, because you look really natural. But there’s all kinds of little tells. There aren’t any hangnails on your fingers even when it gets colder and drier in winter, you don’t come in with shaving cuts or occasional pimples. I did a lot of life drawing when I tried the college thing, and you start noticing all the tiny imperfections that make a face human.” 

The “you” that Takumi refers to is a more general “you”, but all those details would mark Proto as someone of synthetic origins, and it would be entirely natural for a tailor and an artist to notice these things. “That makes sense,” he says. 

Takumi takes off his glasses then, leaves them hanging by the earpiece from a breast pocket of his waistcoat. “If you have a full prosthetic body, then whoever did you did a really subtle job, because you have most of those imperfections. Your hairline is ever so slightly uneven, there’s a tiny bit of asymmetry in the sculpt of your face, you’ve got the faintest hint of freckling across your face and on the backs of your hands that looks like you might once have had them but don’t spend enough time in the sun to do that anymore. And that’s custom work, the way the suits we make here are custom, and the price tag for such bodies tends to be beyond most people. Even our private-sector clients, who tend to be pretty well-heeled, don’t always have access to such high-quality builds and customization.” It’s quite apparent that Takumi doesn’t need the glasses to see clearly, from the way his eyes focus as his gaze darts over Proto, confirming his analysis with swift little glances.

Proto notices the thickness of the earpiece, realizes that the thick tortoise shell plastic frames hide electronics. They’re probably smart glasses with a magnification function, perfect for any artisan who doesn’t want to replace their natural eyes. “Observant,” he says in reply. 

“Comes with the job,” Takumi shrugs. “It’s technically past closing time, so if you’ll just wait here, I’ll take a few minutes to lock up, and we can go.” 

Proto steps away from the counter and wanders in a slow circuit around the displays full of expensive fabrics, as Takumi ducks into the back of the tailor’s shop. There are tweeds and flannels and gabardines, camel and wool and cashmere, fine silks and rayons for linings. It surprises Proto when Takumi emerges from the back of the shop, having checked the locks on the back door, and gotten his overcoat in the meantime, in less than ten minutes. “Nobody else is here?” he asks, as Takumi turns out the store lights, flips the Open sign over, and waves Proto out the door. There is no physical till to secure, as customers at Sawada’s are presumed not to be so vulgar as to attempt to pay for their expensive suits in cash.

“Dad and the other guys here usually leave before this late.” Takumi says. He locks the front door up, and reaches up with a hook to pull the shutters down. “I open and close because I live in the apartment upstairs. They don’t usually stay past six or seven if there isn’t someone here for a late fitting session.” 

“Those working hours sound less than legal.” The air is sharp and cold outside, and Proto’s breath mists as he exhales, another advantage of being partially biological. He passes much better for an unaltered human, when he wants to. 

“Ha ha, joke’s on you, Mr. G-Man.” Takumi explains as they walk the short distance to the RX-8. “Technically I’m not a full employee, I’m an apprentice, and my dad doesn’t actually have to pay me at all. But he does, and he lets me stay upstairs rent-free, so the long hours are okay by me. I’m almost done with the five years anyway, and come next year he’ll let me start cutting suits directly.”

“How much work do you do on each suit order that comes in?” Proto asks as Takumi climbs in the driver’s side, smiles at his low appreciative whistle at the custom interior in the RX-8. It isn’t as though stock RX-8 interiors were anything to shrug at, but whoever had owned this before it wound up at impound, and then at Section 9, had given it custom suede seat covers that are an absolute comfort to lean back against. 

“Well, I’m not the only apprentice here,” Takumi says as Proto pulls out of the parking space, mindful of black ice on the roads after all this precipitation. “There’s two other guys, Sakai and Wada, but they’re junior to me. Dad pays them too, but they don’t get to live upstairs, that’s strictly a family privilege. My dad insists on measuring all the customers himself, because a measurement error means more fittings, and sometimes, waste. Then he drafts the patterns. He hands those off to the cutter-draper, Mr. Mori, who cuts the fabric. We have two professional stitchers, Mrs. Ueda and Mr. Ho, who assemble the suits, and if we have high order volume we have a professional finisher, Mrs. Watanabe, come in to do all the detail work, like the tiny stitches that finish the linings, and the hand-sewn buttonholes. Otherwise, Dad and Mr. Mori will take time out of their day to actually finish the suits. Our job is to learn, and help with the small tasks, like waxing and doubling silk thread for hand finishing work. We mark the stitch lines with thread. We baste the suits together for first fittings. Eventually we start learning to pad-stitch the canvases that give coats their structure. As the senior apprentice, I’m actually allowed to assemble and finish some suits, like the one you’re wearing right now.”

“This one?” Proto raises an eyebrow, glances at Takumi briefly before he looks back at the roads. They’re not as congested, fortunately, as they would be during rush hour. “It’s very nicely done.”

“Like my buttonholes?” Takumi asks. It almost sounds like a come-on, but is not. Takumi is simply proud of his hand-work. “Dad made me practice buttonholes for two years before he even let me do one on a customer-ordered coat. English tailors have a nickname for bad buttonholes: ‘crushed beetles’, because the stitches go every which way and they look like a bug you stepped on.”

“Yes, actually,” Proto says, and he means it. He spent the first evening after he had collected the suits in quiet admiration of the work that went into them, each hand-stitched buttonhole, the surgeon’s cuffs on the sleeves, the hand-sewn bartacks reinforcing each pocket opening, and the tiny prick stitches holding the lapel facings in place. 

Takumi reaches out then and caresses Proto’s arm, where the surgeon’s cuff of his coat sticks out of the sleeve of his rain jacket. It’s an oddly sensual gesture, and yet an entirely unsexual touch, one that expresses Takumi’s deep love of his craft and vocation. “I’m proud of this work,” he says, his smile simple, uncomplicated, full of quiet joy. “Not many people can say that, day to day.”

Proto thinks to the two men he killed, yesterday, and the third one, who he maimed. He searches within himself for any trace of satisfaction, and is oddly reassured at his complete lack of pleasure in the act of killing. “No,” he agrees. “Not even I can.” It’s not as though he would hesitate to kill someone if he had no other option, and he truly had no choice yesterday, not when a hostage’s life was at stake. But it’s good, he thinks, that he feels no pride after making that choice, because that is the kind of person that he wants to be.

—

Dinner is a casual, low-key affair at an izakaya less than 10 minutes’ driving time away from the garment district, and it’s busy but not packed, which is good. The ambient noise is going to make it hard to eavesdrop. 

“So what kind of help do you need? You mentioned a case,” Takumi asks, after their first orders have arrived — beers, edamame, boiled in their thick, furry pods, fried tofu served hot in a dashi broth. Proto is paying for two hours of all-you-can-eat, which should leave the both of them quite well fed indeed. 

There’s a free appetizer of house-made pickles made with sake lees, and the hot towel feels good on Proto’s face and hands. He puts the towel down, folds it neatly, and begins with a slice of pickle. “There’s been a rash of android mutilations occurring since August,” he says, summing up the data that’s been sitting in his head since this morning. “Most recent one with the same M.O was today, earlier in the afternoon. Most of the crimes occurred around mob-owned host bars, but two of them took place at bars associated with the gay side of the city’s nightlife district. One at Rocky’s, and another at Chroma.”

“Shit,” Takumi shakes his head, his chopsticks paused temporarily on the way back to his mouth, a cube of fried tofu held between their points. “That’s very creepy, and you know what? Good call on coming to me for advice, because both Rocky’s and Chroma are seriously weird places even considering the Niihama City gay scene. They’re both cyborg chaser bars.”

“Cyborg chaser?” Proto can infer what the phrase means, from context, but he’s not run into that particular subculture before. He waits politely for Takumi to finish his cube of tofu, eats a pod of edamame, squeezing the beans one by one into his mouth, as he does. They’re here to get dinner, after all.

“Ok,” Takumi explains, after a swallow of his beer. “So I had a gaijin boyfriend back in college, and what he told me was, what he didn’t understand about local gay culture is that it’s really categorized. And that’s true. People looking for hookups are specific to the point where, if you wanna sleep only with guys who have acne scars, you can. Now, that’s normal for me. But apparently, they aren’t that granular or descriptive elsewhere. Now, the first thing we humans figure out to do with new technology is to use it for sex. Cybernetic body prostheses aren’t excluded from that. Those two bars would be places where cyborgs go to get picked up by people who fetishize them, or where fetishists go to show off their sex toy androids. They’re also faster and looser about gender than other gay bars I’ve gone to, in general.”

“How so?” Proto asks. He knows better than to interrupt Takumi now that he’s building up to an explanation, but he still feels like he should interject to verbalize the attention he’s paying to the conversation. 

Both Takumi and Proto pause then as an android waitress comes in with their next dishes — grilled pollock roe, sliced. Yakitori. Grilled miso eggplant, and they both take a few more bites of food before Takumi speaks up again. “So like,” he says, after they’ve both eaten some more, “some places are okay with newhalfs. Some aren’t. Anyway the Western categorizations don’t work out as well here, since a lot of the history of queer culture here involves a third sex kind of categorization rather than what you’d consider a transgender individual. But if your shell is something you put on, and you present as female during the work week, but put on a masculine shell to pick people up over the weekend, how are you defined, gender-wise? So the assumption at both bars is that you’re there to fuck people who present similarly to you, no matter what their legal identity happens to be.”

“And that’s different from how other gay bars might handle it?” Proto asks. This is generally new to him. The few times he’s been in bars as a customer in the year and a half of his experience, he has gone with the other members of Section 9. He doesn’t really bother much with nightlife, since he benefits little from the alcohol. 

Takumi shrugs. “From personal anecdotal experience, someone who’s transitioned with prosthetics and who is also gay, who isn’t really interested in cyborg fetishists, they just go to regular gay or lesbian bars, because the subculture is also part of the socialization. I mean, with apps you never have to step into a gay bar to get laid, so you go there mostly to hang out in a place where you know you’ll be welcome. Rocky’s and Chroma are a bit more freewheeling because the gay part kind of takes second place to the robosexual part.” 

“Robosexual.” Proto raises an eyebrow.

“Yeah, that’s what some cyborg chasers call themselves.” 

They’ve finished off the eggplant by then, and most of the yakitori, and Proto picks up the last slice of grilled mentaiko, pops it in his mouth while he thinks about what he’s learned so far. “The Niihama PD records of the crime scenes are fairly incomplete — the owners of both bars refused to comment when asked about the crimes. Is there any historical reason this would be so?”

“Well, if you ask me, being a robosexual is actually more marginalized at this point than being gay is, and I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but it still sucks to be gay.”

“I’ve noticed the prevalence of casual homophobia with the prefectural police, yes.” It’s not anything that has been aimed in Proto’s direction, of course, but even the neglect they showed in this case, the lack of support that Detective Aizawa struggled with in her own investigations, it speaks plainly, if silently, to him. 

Takumi pauses again as the waitress brings more food. Potato croquettes, grilled sausages. More skewers, this time of thinly sliced beef rolled around green onions. “It’s not just that,” he says, after he picks up a skewer and puts it on his plate. “Looking like you do, compulsorily heterosexual men probably would find you a bit threatening because you’re handsome, which means if they’re fighting bisexual or homosexual attraction internally, you could endanger their public image. But they wouldn’t voice it, because they assume you’re straight, so it’s all sublimated hostility. If you’re out, then that hostility can escalate to threats, because their desire for you is truly dangerous to the polite fiction that they aren’t actually attracted to you.”

“That explains some things,” Proto says after he’s swallowed a bite of croquette. Like how the chinpira in the Yakuza-owned bar reacted to him earlier today. And some of the looks he’s gotten before, an odd, uneasy blend of longing and anger. 

“You’re really hot, too, in case I haven’t emphasized that enough,” Takumi says, oddly serious given his previous attempts at flirting and and general air of irreverence, “and you dress well enough that you could code as queer depending on how much they read into how dapper you are. So welcome, I guess, to the weird world of being gay, even if you aren’t.”

“Thank you,” Proto senses that it’s appropriate to show a little humor here, so he lets out a tiny huff of amusement. “Do I get my membership card from you?”

“I don’t know, I’ve been waiting for my copy of the gay agenda for like, sixteen years now, and it still hasn’t arrived,” says Takumi, glibly. “But anyway. Back to robosexuals. Being attracted to someone who has a prosthetic shell, just for the prosthetic shell, crosses the whole ‘are they intelligent and do they count as human’ barrier. I don’t know if there’s an academic name for it. Especially if the real attraction is to androids, who as far as I know don’t count as people yet. There’s also the gender bending implications, especially if one participant, like I mentioned before, is a woman by day and a man by night, or the other way around. That crosses all the lines of categorization that people use to organize themselves socially, so it’s a really uncomfortable thing, to remind the normal person that you exist.”

This reminds Proto a lot about the thoughts he’s had on how various individuals have reacted to the Tachikomas. And also, of how his teammates reacted to the truth about his synthetic nature, with the complete lack of surprise from most of the veterans, who had spent years working with AI tanks and other cyborgs. And then he wonders where Takumi learned all that, if he wasn’t also a chaser himself. It makes him wonder about Takumi’s attraction to him, in any case. “How do you know this much about the scene?” he asks.

“Dated a guy who had a full prosthetic body once. He got it because he was dying of muscular dystrophy without it, and his first couple boyfriends were chasers. Really disturbed him because he wanted to be liked as a person, not just because he had a synthetic body. I gotta say, though, there’s a nice advantage to that. No refractory period. Sorry, that’s probably TMI.” Takumi looks down at his now-empty plate, just a little self-conscious at that slip. Proto senses that he’s used to being more open about his sex life when talking in queer company, and that the gaffe has occurred largely because of the topic at hand. 

This doesn’t really offend Proto, though. It is one of the benefits of a full body prosthetic, his own included, should he ever decide to try it out. “No, continue,” he says, adopting an encouraging tone of voice. 

“Right.” Takumi clears his throat, takes another drink of his beer, puts the glass down, as though those gestures will somehow clear the awkwardness from the conversation. “Anyway,” he continues shortly after, “because of how scandalous it still is to prefer the company of androids or cyborgs — like, it’s fine to use a sex doll in a brothel, it’s just disposable fun, but to want to hang out with one, what is wrong with you, you know? That’s like wanting to take your sex toy out to a dinner at a nice restaurant. That’s the mindset outsiders have, so chaser bars will be really close-lipped and distrustful of authority. And if you went in flashing your badge, they’d just ignore you, and that’s if the cyborg bouncers don’t turn you into a living shumai of misery. Don’t do that, by the way, I worked my fingers off putting your suit together and I don’t want to worry about anything horrible happening to it.” 

“What would you do in my place?” Proto asks, seriously. He doubts that it would be easy for anyone to turn him into, as Takumi put it, “a living shumai of misery”, but he doesn’t want to alienate people more than they already have been.

Takumi remains silent for a few seconds, glancing at the croquette crumbs on his plate, before he looks up, his gaze serious, just a little worried. “Go as a customer, buy some drinks, flirt with some people, get the gossip. Of course, if you are fully prosthetic, then you’re going to get people all over you once they figure it out.” Takumi makes a slight face at the thought, not a bad one, just an odd, twisty expression that comes across to Proto as profound ambivalence. “That means hands on your ass and up your coat. You might get invited for some rough trade in the bathroom. And given how you told me earlier you haven’t figured out what you are yet… that’s going to be uncomfortable as fuck. So bring a date. One of your coworkers will do, someone who can keep his hand around your waist and give you a peck on the cheek occasionally, just enough to give everyone else the idea that you’re — and I hate to say it this way — someone else’s property.”

Proto thinks of the other field officers at Section 9, disqualifies several of them for reasons that seem obvious. Paz is too heterosexual, Togusa too married. Azuma… is too Azuma. Somehow he doesn’t imagine any of them would be up to playing his partner at a gay bar, except maybe the Major, and that comes with its own inherent problems. “My body is fully synthetic, yes, and the only coworker I can imagine doing this with is a woman. She’s also my superior officer. I don’t think she would agree, even if that would work.” 

“Yeah.” Takumi laughs a little, shakes his head. “You’re going to need a volunteer, then… And I guess I volunteer.”

“You’re not doing this just to kiss me, are you?” Proto asks him, only half serious. 

“No,” says Takumi. “I promise you, that’s all that’s going to happen, and only if it has to happen. But I guess, my reasoning is, if the prefectural police aren’t investigating this properly, and if you run into a brick wall on this case, then nobody else will care. If whoever it is is targeting pretty host android boys, then who’s to say they won’t move on to pretty gay men in the future?”

“That was my justification for taking this case,” Proto says. He’s gotten a pretty good read on Takumi’s expressions and tone of voice, his body language, and everything that he’s seeing indicates that he’s serious about the offer, and telling the truth. He’s genuinely a little worried about what this might mean for him. 

“Yeah. I’m a pretty gay man, so I have some personal interest in the matter, I guess.” Takumi says that with a little shrug that doesn’t diffuse the tension on his brow, around his mouth. “And my name is Takumi Sawada, and it’s nice to meet you.”

“You know my name from the order forms,” Proto says.

“Well,” explains Takumi, “I’m not kissing someone I haven’t been introduced to, even if it’s just for show.”

That’s fair, Proto guesses. “Hajime Iwasaki. It’s nice to meet you, too.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is somewhat slower, but I assure you, I'm going somewhere with it. And so is Proto. The red herrings have been salted and laid down. The text has been leavened with clues, true and false alike. May you all enjoy the latest chapter of this fic. 
> 
> Content warning: Racial microaggressions

All is silent in the morning hush, before the rest of Section 9’s field officers come in to work, and Proto lies stretched out full-length on one of the couches in the employee break room, his hair tousled against the rain jacket he has folded up as an improvised pillow. His coat rests over his chest like a blanket, although he does not feel cold. He has spent most of the early morning here, having returned from dropping Takumi off at Sawada’s after his discreet forays out to Rocky’s and Chroma, two cyborg chaser bars where two of the android bodies had been found. 

Proto would still be working in his office, except that his self-diagnostic program had begun warning him that his body needed to rest. Therefore he retreated to the break room to lie down, while his mind remained lively and active. There are footsteps behind him, the sound of a newspaper rustling, and he accesses the building’s IR system to see that Saito has entered the break room with a canned coffee from one of the foyer vending machines and the morning paper in hand. He’s half an hour early, but that makes sense. Some days he likes to come in and read the paper in the quiet of the break room, before anyone else arrives.

“Good morning, Saito,” Proto says, with his eyes still closed. There’s the soft creak of leather, a slight displacement in the L-shaped couch, as Saito takes a seat on its other arm. 

“Morning, Proto. Hope I didn’t wake you.” His words are punctuated with more rustling as he unfolds the newspaper and takes a look at the articles on the front page. It’s nothing new to Proto, who checked the online edition of the news when he crawled out of his office to lie down here in the break room.

“No. My mind doesn’t need sleep,” Proto explains, “but my body needs rest. I can still run simulations and go through databases like this. Fill out paperwork.” Lying perfectly still like this, he knows he probably looks a little unreal, like a corpse or a doll. He had to learn how to fidget, to shake a leg or drum his fingertips on a desk, in those early days in Harima, when he had just learned to use his body. That’s another thing that separates him from his android cousins. The Tachikomas fidgeted. And so does he.

“Efficient,” Saito says, presumably from behind the newspaper page. “What if you keep moving around, though?”

Proto sighs, a heartfelt gesture, and opens his eyes slightly, blinks drowsily, and then closes them again. “They put an alarm in my head. It’s like the one you hear when you try to drive without your seatbelt on. It’s very annoying, and it won’t stop until I lie down for at least two hours.” The sound that plays when the notification pops up was calculated to get Proto’s attention by doing the equivalent of sandpapering his nerves, and he ranks it somewhere between nails on chalkboards and colicky infants. 

“You can turn it off in emergencies, I hope.” Saito sounds vaguely horrified at that. 

“Yes,” Proto says. He knows why the alarm is there — it’s the same reason he can feel pain. Because frustration and annoyance are also useful feelings to have, warnings that one is pursuing a course of action that may prove wasteful if continued. More importantly, unaltered humans have proven able to overwork themselves to death, and it probably wouldn’t do for Proto to get so distracted that he forgets to take care of his body, which is also why he can feel hunger and, following considerable expenditure of his power charge, also weariness.

“I kind of envied how you were able to just … glue yourself together after you got shot and stabbed, but I guess there’s a downside to everything,” Saito says with a small laugh. There’s the fluttery sound of the newspaper being put down on the coffee table, and then the sound of the ring tab on the can of coffee being pulled off, a soft metallic wrench. 

“Well,” Proto says, smiling a little at the thought, “it’s not as though you don’t have your own version of that alarm. You just get more and more fatigued and irritable until you fall over.” 

Saito puts his canned coffee down with a hollow, metallic sound, and picks the newspaper up again. “Yeah, but at least it doesn’t make an annoying noise. What kept you here so late? The android mutilation case you’re working on?” 

“Yes.” Proto says. “In following-up on the investigation yesterday, I got called a call-boy by a Yakuza grunt, took a gay tailor out for dinner, went to a couple gay bars, had my first kiss, and then came right back here because I needed to update my crime scene simulations.” He might feel a little self-conscious discussing such matters with other members of Section 9, for various reasons, but Saito has always struck him as someone he can speak to frankly.

“Whoa,” Saito says, teasing slightly as he turns a page on the newspaper. “Aren’t you a little young to date, let alone be kissing people in gay bars?”

Proto shrugs under his coat, moving enough for the gesture to be visible, but not enough for it to register on his diagnostics. “It probably wouldn’t have happened if I’d brought one of you along with me to pretend, I suppose, but I really didn’t know if anyone else would have agreed to come along except for the Major, and that would have given people entirely the wrong impression.”

“You make it sound like I’ve never been in a gay bar.” Saito’s voice is now soft and serious, the newspaper crinkling as he puts it down again, and Proto opens his eyes to look at him, to check if he actually is joking. 

It is obvious that Saito is not joking at all. “Well,” Proto says in reply, “I wouldn’t know. We don’t talk about our personal lives much at work.” It isn’t just a professionality thing, Proto senses, but rather, because work at Section 9 can expose a field officer to such horrors that any semblance of a personal life is a refuge and escape from the daily grind, a kind of coping mechanism. 

“No, we don’t. But if you ever need backup like that again, ask me. Won’t be my first time in one. Won’t be the last, either.” It’s clear, the implication of what Saito is saying, and Proto considers the homosociality of Japanese culture, the machismo enforced in military contexts, know why Saito is being evasive even as he bares a facet of his private self to Proto. 

“Thank you,” Proto says. He appreciates Saito’s candor and kindness greatly in this instance, given how tight-lipped he is about the rest of his past. “Fortunately my contact was very professional.” 

“Well, good,” Saito says, picking his newspaper up again. It hides his face, rather conveniently. “I don’t want to be patronizing, but I feel like I should be protective over you, in an older sibling sort of way. It’s how otherworldly you seem sometimes, I guess.” And that’s a valid thought. Proto knows that no matter how well he passes for human most of the time, there are certain aspects of him that are wholly inhuman. It is what it is. But he is pleasantly surprised to find that his slight strangeness is perceived positively as vulnerability that needs to be protected, rather than danger that needs to be neutralized.

“Well, it’s fortunate that most people won’t be able to make me do anything I don’t want to, without sustaining major injury in the attempt.” It would take a cyberbrain hacker to do that, and a good one, to get past Proto’s layered defenses and deal with the fact that they aren’t hacking a brain, but a neurochip, beneath his braincase. There are maybe a dozen people in the world who could get away with doing this, he estimates, and two of them work for Section 9. One of them is Dr. Asuda. The other is Major Kusanagi.

“That’s true enough. It wasn’t a bad experience, was it? Even if it was just for show.” Saito asks. Proto can hear the concern leaking out in the timbre of his voice, despite his nonchalant tone, and it warms him internally to know Saito cares, even as he pauses the simulations running in his head so he can give his full attention to the answer.

“It was nice,” Proto says after a few moments of silence, having gone through his memory to analyze his feelings, quantify them for description. Takumi’s breath was warm and soft on his cheek, a contrast to the scratch of stubble against his skin, and his lips were slightly chapped, but gentle. “Pleasant in the way having one’s hand held is. Or the way Batou claps me on the shoulder when I’ve done something he approves of. I know this probably means I’m not ready for anything more than friendship with anyone, yet.”

“And that’s okay,” Saito says with a shrug visible from behind the newspaper. “Even if you never get past this point, some people don’t. It’s fine.”

“I know what asexuality is, Saito,” Proto says gently, because he has started to anticipate where the conversation is headed.

“Good,” Saito puts the newspaper down, grins in a blend of humor and relief. “Was worried I was going to have to give you the talk, for a moment.”

Proto imagines that offer coming from anyone else at Section 9, to varying degrees of cognitive dissonance and private amusement. “Better you than some of the others,” he says as he resumes the simulation he’s been running most of the evening, changes his position on the couch, and adjusts the fall of his coat over his torso. Time to rest some more.

“Heh, yeah,” Saito says, returning to the daily news. Proto closes his eyes, and settles himself on his side, his breathing slow and even. More footsteps ring out behind him, but he does not check the IR feeds this time. He’ll learn who they are when they exchange greetings with Saito, eventually.

— 

Proto understands intellectually why things like homophobia exist. It’s because the world is huge and complicated, and it’s easier to deal with how unpredictable life is if you put things into categories and define them sharply. It doesn’t make understanding it on an emotional level any easier, which is a little amusing, given that AIs don’t really concern themselves with emotion, most of the time. But Proto has feelings, and a personality that values life in all its diversity, and he’s also complex enough to know that strictly defined categories only work to a certain point. 

Proto met some unusual people last night, yes, but he would hesitate to call them freaks, for all that he felt profoundly out of place among them. He feels that it’s whatever normativity he has that leaves him out of place, as opposed to something they’ve done. And in the grand scheme of things, can loving a non-sapient android truly be harmful, since the android isn’t sapient enough to be harmed by such one-sided affection? Proto thinks not. Moral objections largely concern themselves with the notion that robosexuals are doing something unnatural, but typical people talk of their cars and rice cookers as though they were sapient, all the time. Yet others think that robosexuals could eventually become unsatisfied with mere artificial lovers, and seek to brainwash young and impressionable humans into becoming living love dolls, which is clearly illogical. Robosexuals love the androids and cyborgs they do because of their artificiality, and seeking out a living lover would ultimately be unsatisfactory for them.

This doesn’t mean that Proto was entirely comfortable at Rocky’s, and later, at Chroma’s. He has had people admire him and tell him outright he is attractive. That fits within his range of experiences, and is what he’s used to seeing day to day. But he isn’t used to the heat and avidity in the gazes he was faced with last night, the way some of the customers at both bars were looking at him. As though his very existence was their ultimate sexual fantasy. It’s a little objectifying, he has to admit, which is something he doesn’t normally experience, since for all intents and purposes he presents as male in a patriarchal society, which means that he’s expected to be the one to employ the lustful gaze, and not to receive it in return. 

But Proto had to go into a safe space established for lovers of androids and cyborgs to be looked at like that, and all he had to do to stop being looked at was to leave. And he knows very well that most of the people staring hungrily at him in the bars will have returned to their weekday lives. They are people who might have stood pressed up against him in the subway, who have never betrayed their secret desires to him, because they respected his autonomy and his boundaries. Entering those bars, then, was a signifier of consent, which is why he did not grudge the others their lust and desire. And the very tiny part of him that is vain liked the attention somewhat, despite the vague discomfort he felt at the idea of participating in any sexual activity with any of his admirers. 

Things felt different with Takumi, who Proto can at least say he knows, on a superficial level. Being touched is pleasant. Being kissed on the cheek feels nice. He didn’t feel any reciprocal sexual impulse while being treated such, but it was a comfortable experience. Safe, even, since he felt that he could trust Takumi to not go beyond the boundaries they had established before they had walked into the bar. Proto thinks that he wouldn’t mind going further than just a kiss on the cheek eventually, partly out of curiosity, and also because of a genuine desire to make a more permanent, intimate kind of contact. And that’s fine, as well. 

Proto does not expect the way he approaches sex and desire to be identical to the way a human experiences it, since hormones do not make up part of the decision-making process for him. It may be that he will forever be denied that instinctual urge to pair off and mate that many humans possess, but asexual and demisexual people exist, and he doesn’t think anything is inherently wrong with them, either. But it’s all academic, since he hasn’t known anyone well enough and for long enough to really consider making that kind of a decision yet. 

Simulations aside, one body, four witness accounts, and nine forensic crime scene recordings are scant information to go on, despite the identical M.O uniting all these mutilations. He’s fairly sure that it’s the same person, at least, and that they’re what the experts from the three American successor-states would all classify as a mixed offender. 

This categorization dates back to the 1980s, when the FBI worked to group serial killers, based on common traits and M.Os, into groups that would make it easier to create psychological profiles of them. Organized offenders plan their kills, abducting victims, killing them elsewhere, and then methodically disposing of the body afterwards. They tend to hold stable jobs, often have families who suspect little to nothing of their extracurricular activities. Organized offenders are generally rovers, searching for vulnerable victims to target some distance away from their home neighborhoods.

Disorganized offenders, on the other hand, tend to strike from impulse, and with excessive violence. They make little to no attempt to hide the body after the killing, and tend to be loners who have trouble assimilating into conventional society. Many disorganized offenders tend to have a long history of mental illness. Disorganized offenders tend to kill in areas neighboring their own home, when they spot a victim that suits their criteria, as opposed to targeting specific individuals over time.

Mixed offenders are those whose crimes bear a mix of traits from both categories, as with the case Proto is working right now. The bodies were all left in plain sight afterwards, but the androids were all deactivated with a few fairly neat blows, as opposed to a frenzied burst of stab wounds. Geographically the crime scenes are scattered all over Niihama City’s nightlife districts, but that’s mostly because that’s where you will find attractive male androids — the gender ratio for android staff skews heavily towards female androids in most cases, because it’s more usual for women to be seen as subordinate in Japanese culture. Most male androids tend to be secretarial or security models. 

In truth Proto does not like the practice of profiling in general, and considers it a pseudoscience dressed up in a psychologist’s tweed jacket. It’s too prone to human errors of judgment, such as confirmation bias, and it’s too easy for a human profiler to miss their own prejudice and blind spots when fingering a suspect. This can lead to miscarriages of justice, especially because profilers themselves are seen as authoritative experts by the public and the judiciary. But categorizing killers by M.O and crime scene is still useful, because it helps investigators weed out potential copycat crimes, and unrelated murders which may have occurred in the same geographical neighborhood. 

Proto feels the weight shift on the couch he’s lying on, as Saito folds up his newspaper and leaves, either for his own office, or the range. Someone else takes the seat shortly after or one near it. It’s a more massive weight, compared to Saito’s build, which gives Proto an idea of who it might be. The displacement on the couch doesn’t feel like Batou’s 300+kg mass, which means it’s probably either Borma or the Major. Borma prefers to hang out in the diving room with Ishikawa when he’s not in his own office, which narrows it down to Major Kusanagi. 

Proto opens his eyes to confirm his guess, lifting his head a little from his folded rain jacket to glance at the other arm of the couch, and he’s right. The Major is sitting there, watching him with her crimson eyes. Her gaze has never bothered him. She, more than the other members of Section 9, watches and waits in silence. It’s something she does, usually before springing into decisive action. It’s something they both have in common, which makes Proto wonder for a few moments how much influence she had over the programming of his personality and habits.

“Good morning, Major Kusanagi,” Proto says. He rolls back into a supine position, sighs a little at the notification pinging in his vision again, that annoying buzz, dismisses it mentally. His coat slides off his chest to reveal his shirt and tie, the brown leather shoulder holster he carries his sidearm in, but he catches it by the lapel before it hits the floor and drapes it over his lap instead. 

“Good morning, Proto. Pulled an all-nighter, did you?” the Major asks him. 

“Yes, a first time for me,” he says. “Probably not the last.” 

“There are staff apartments upstairs that you can borrow. Check in with the Operators, they’ll pass you a key.”

“No, it’s fine. I’m almost done resting. But thank you, Major Kusanagi. I’ll keep it in mind for next time.” Proto isn’t exactly uncomfortable on this couch, but then he would have been equally comfortable on a hard concrete floor. Still, a bed and blankets would have been nice, even if the cold does not exactly oppress him. He finds himself enjoying the weight of the covers, when he curls up in his loft for the night. 

“I’ve also noticed, you’re not wearing a watch. You might want to consider it.”

Proto glances up at her, back down at his left wrist. He doesn’t quite see the point in wearing a watch, because he does have access to a highly accurate clock in his head. 

“I know,” the Major smiles, anticipating his thoughts as he glances up to her left wrist, and the elegant watch around it. It’s something that’s very much a part of her, as much as the uniforms she wears, or the fact that she has purple hair and crimson eyes. “It seems superfluous for me to wear a watch, as well. But it’s part of the package, especially if you’re wearing a suit as nice as that. It’s about the image you want to display. A good suit without the right accessories is like a fine kimono with a cheap obi. Incomplete and out of place.”

Proto weighs it over, finds her argument logical. “I see. Do you have any advice?” 

“For the look you’ve got,” the Major says, catching his eye, “and don’t think I haven’t noticed your sartorial choices so far — I’d suggest a vintage Swiss-made mechanical watch with a good retune job, something from the 60s or 70s, somewhere in the the ¥60,000 price range. You can find a good automatic in that price range, if you pick a mid-range brand.” 

Proto nods. “Should I be flattered that you’ve noticed how I dress, or concerned about it?”

“Flattered. You dress very well for someone who doesn’t have much experience with formality, but you do so with just enough creativity that you’re not just another man in a suit, unlike some other people we’ve seen.” 

Proto can think of multiple examples of what the Major is talking about, mostly civil servants and politicians for whom the suit is a uniform, as opposed to a means of demonstrating personal tastes and styles. “Appearances matter.” 

She nods. “They do.” 

That’s just the conversation they’re having with their voices, however. What they’re saying mind-to-mind is something completely different. 

“Proto,” the Major says silently, “how are you progressing on your investigations?”

“More information is required,” he tells her on the encrypted channel she has just set up so they can talk with as much privacy as is required. “Hopefully the Korinkai will decide to share what information they have before the killer goes out and finds another victim.”

“You’re not thinking of putting yourself out there as bait, I hope,” the Major says. 

Proto would have betrayed himself with a guilty start if he had less control over his body. The thought has crossed his mind, but it’s currently unfeasible for several reasons. Most important of those is the fact that he still doesn’t know how the killer is selecting their victims yet. “I would have to look less human for that to work easily,” he explains, “and as it is people tend to assume I’m a cyborg with a full body prosthetic rather than an android.”

“I want to set up a duress code with you, just in case,” the Major suggests. “My Ghost is whispering that it may be useful in the near future.”

“Can you articulate what makes you feel this way?” Proto asks. He’s curious as to her thoughts on the matter. 

“I can’t be certain,” Major Kusangi says with the mental equivalent of a shrug, “but I’ve learned not to ignore the whispers of my Ghost. Message me about your search for a watch, and turn your internal tracker on, and I’ll have an armed surveillance team shadow you as soon as possible.”

“Thank you, Major.”

The Major closes the channel, signaling the end of that conversation, and Proto closes his eyes to find that he can now enable and disable a tracker built into his body. It has presumably been there all this time, in the event of his possible escape or malfunction, but now he is allowed to know it exists, and turn it on and off. The weight shifts off the couch he is lying on before he opens his eyes again, and a firm, gentle hand lingers briefly on his shoulder before the Major leaves the break room. _I trust you,_ that touch says, _but you have to trust me, too._

There is nobody that Proto would trust more at Section 9 than the Major, except perhaps the Chief, and he knows that her suggestions are made in absolute, deadly seriousness. He thinks then, of the people who would frequent the places where the victims have all been found, wonders if someone he has met so far has always noticed him and all the tiny little ways he isn’t quite human, wonders if it’ll be his turn to meet someone with a cleaver in their hand two or three weeks from now. What will they want from him, in that case? 

—

Proto is reluctant to return to his office after his rest in the break room. He’s spent entirely too much time there over the past 24 hours. It’s starting to feel claustrophobic, as his incomplete map of the killings seems to beg him for more information. He wonders if this is what leads to apophenia in humans. Instead he changes out of his suit into a duty uniform, and gives the suit a good spritz with a bottle of fabric odor eliminator that he keeps in his locker to deal with the residual smell of spent gunpowder clinging to his clothes, just in case he has to discharge his sidearm on the job. It’s not something he’s done yet, but in this case the odor eliminator does a good job on the stale, lingering smells of cigarette smoke from the bars he’d been in yesterday afternoon and evening. 

Then he cracks the seal on one of the bottles of Everclear in his locker and takes a quick swig, then another. It’s not really a recommended course of action for anyone who has an uncyberized liver, but in Proto’s case the alcohol is converted directly by his metabolism into energy that he uses to keep functioning. He caps the bottle after that, shuts his locker door, and heads down to the shooting range. 

Proto’s sense of procedural memory is different from that of a human’s, cyborg or otherwise, and while highly-cyberized operators like the Major, Batou, or Borma can rely to some extent on control software to drive their actions in combat operations, practice is still necessary for experience, to learn when and how to improvise when the software offers no answers. Paz, Saito, Togusa and Azuma all spend significant amounts of time in the range and running kill-house exercises to keep their reflexes sharp, as procedural motor memory degrades over time. 

Proto’s problems all come from the other end of the equation, however. With the right control software his body will execute actions perfectly. He would never miss a shot, or could play Rachmaninoff’s Second flawlessly. The problem is, he will do those things perfectly and consistently every single time, in a repetition that can be exploited by experienced human opponents. Therefore he utilizes range time to practice without relying on control software, so he can perform consistently but not entirely predictably in varying circumstances. 

Standing at the booth in the range, Proto puts his hair up again, so loose strands won’t catch in the earpieces of his shooting glasses, or in the headband of his ear protectors. Not that he needs hearing protection, having built-in audio dampeners, but he’s a stickler for range safety, as the Major prefers. This is the one inconvenience of leaving his hair hanging down to mid-back. It gets in the way sometimes. But the remedy is a hair tie and a single bobby pin, easy to keep in a pocket or looped around his wrist, so he doesn’t consider it a loss of efficiency. 

Then he practices draw-fire exercises with his Seburo M5 sidearm without the benefits of control software, working to minimize the delay from the cross-draw. Such holsters are kind of old-fashioned especially in a group like Section 9; he and Togusa are the only field officers here who employ daily shoulder carry of their sidearms. The Major, being a cyborg with a full body prosthetic, likes to carry high up her back just below a shoulder blade, a draw position that requires cybernetic flexibility to use. Most of the others prefer to carry behind the hip on their dominant side. 

The drawbacks of shoulder holsters are immediately apparent: it’s a slightly slower draw, with the muzzle pointing to the left in the cross-draw, with a right-handed user. An accidental weapon discharge could injure him, on a bad draw, or someone standing beside him. That, of course, assumes that he is foolish enough to draw like an idiot, with his finger on the trigger and the safety disengaged. Moreover, it’s easier to access a firearm in a shoulder rig while wearing winter wear, and easier to draw from a seated position in a vehicle, as well.

The time-honored failure-to-stop drill, consisting of two center-mass shots followed by a headshot, is now sadly obsolete in a time of cyborgs with full prosthetic bodies, who are rather tougher than unaltered humans. All Section 9 field officers are expected to be able to place a double-tap in an opponent’s head right out of a holster draw, to incapacitate cyborg opponents as quickly as possible. It’s a messy business, considering the AP explosive rounds they use, designed to detonate once the round has penetrated an opponent’s titanium braincase, but the point of drawing one’s firearm in combat is to incapacitate opponents as swiftly as possible, which means you drop them by whatever means you can. 

Merely wounding someone may leave them able to act, which could mean a dead hostage or hostages, or a dead co-worker. Those lives weigh far more in the calculus of firefights than an opponent’s life ever will. 

Proto has paused to reload his magazines for the third time when the rangemaster signals that someone else is coming into the range. The buzzer sounds, and Proto glances over to find Paz sauntering over to the booth to his right. 

“Word on the grapevine tells me you caused a good stir over with the Korinkai,” Paz says soundlessly over cybercomm. He’s got his own sidearm in a locking case — Proto knows that Paz is rather more of a knife aficionado when it comes to close combat, and doesn’t always carry a gun. It’s a sensible choice in a Japan where an off-duty Section 9 field officer can be prosecuted for discharging his firearm in defense of someone else, as Togusa was several months ago. That was a political ploy, but nevertheless Paz is of the mindset that it’d be a lot easier to just silently murder his opponent and not report the incident in the first place. 

Proto isn’t sure if he approves, but that’s none of his business. The Major will do something about it if Paz steps over the line. So Proto doesn’t have to approve, but he keeps his disapproval to himself in the interest of camaraderie.

“They like to stay familiar with the prefectural police investigators, you see,” Paz continues, “and they keep some faces on file. So you come in, and quelle horreur, the chinpira doesn’t recognize you and calls you a gigolo.” It’s considered polite not to inquire about a Section 9 field officer’s background unless they discuss it openly themselves, like Togusa’s past work as a detective, but it’s also an open secret that Paz used to work for a rival Yakuza organization before he was scouted by the Major, and that he still retains contacts from the old days and gets the gossip from them once in a while. 

“He called me a call-boy, actually.” The difference, as Proto understands it, is that a gigolo services women and a call-boy services men. But it’s not a hard line, either. Some sex workers take customers of any gender. 

“Same difference.” Paz puts on his shooting glasses and ear protectors, unlocks the case his sidearm is stored in. “It’s embarrassing. And they really don’t like to have Section 9 looking at their business, because they really don’t want to be involved in anything that anyone of our weight class gets involved in, after the Jarti incident a couple years ago… wait, it’s been almost three years. Damn.”

“That was before my time, but I’m familiar with the case.” Proto finishes reloading the three magazines he’s brought with him, puts them back in his mag carriers and in the magazine well of his sidearm, then waits for Paz to get ready before he starts shooting again. It’s only polite. 

“Yeah,” Paz says, as he looks down his sights at the target in the range, squeezes a double-tap off. “I think they’re gonna decide discretion is the better part of valor and invite you to a lunch meeting later today. It’ll probably be a classy place, to demonstrate how seriously they’re taking it, and they’ll probably pass you the private security footage of the host bars the bodies were found at. Maybe even the guest lists.”

“Should I bring someone with me?” Proto has also resumed shooting at a fresh target. He’s taking more time with the shots since he’s doing draw-fire exercises, which require him to replace his gun in the holster between each double-tap. 

“You won’t have to,” Paz says, as he waits for Proto to empty his magazine, “but they probably expect you to bring muscle. Might as well choose someone who you think deserves Kyoto-style kaiseki cuisine.” 

“Like you?” Proto does not reload his sidearm this time. He places it on the counter before him and summons his target, notes with satisfaction that it doesn’t so much have multiple bullet holes in it as much as one very ragged hole in the middle of the head.

“Maybe me,” Paz agrees, as he looks at his own target too. The shot grouping is not as tight nor as neat as Proto’s, but he’s holding his own in a team full of ex-military servicemembers and combat cyborgs. “I’m not really big on fancy etiquette though. That’s why I joined up with the Major.” 

Proto glances at the boxes of ammunition he’s used up as he hits the mag release on his sidearm, slides the empty mag out for reloading, again. That’s 200 rounds so far, and he has 40 more rounds in his two remaining magazines. Might as well call it for today’s range time. He can always come back and practice more tomorrow. A thought at the internal clock in his head tells him it’s past 11 in the morning, which means he probably should have a shower and wash the smell of spent gunpowder off his hair and skin before he changes back into his nice suit in anticipation of the lunch invitation later today. 

—

As luck and Paz’s suggestions would have it, Kasuga calls Proto back while he’s standing under a hot shower in the locker room. Fortunately he doesn’t need to pick up a phone. He remains standing under the water, while he rinses shampoo suds out of his long hair, and picks up the call mentally.

“Hello,” Proto says, noting the name on the caller ID. 

“Ah, Mr. Iwasaki,” Kasuga says. He sounds like he’s had his morning coffee, at least. “My colleagues and I would like to invite you over to lunch, or a late lunch, today or tomorrow, whichever is convenient with you.”

“Today will be fine, thank you,” Proto says mentally as he turns his face upwards to meet the hot water, sighs in quiet contentment. “Where shall I meet you?”

“Ah, you know the restaurant Miyazawa, yes? Downtown.” Miyazawa is one of Niihama City’s most exclusive restaurants, a ryotei, that serves traditional Japanese kaiseki cuisine. Customers aren’t billed at the close of the meal — no, they’re quietly billed at the end of every month — and they routinely send dishes to the local ochaya, or geisha houses, where such rarefied entertainments take place. As much as Proto makes a month, he probably wouldn’t be the kind of customer they would normally welcome in. He doesn’t look Japanese enough, or have the kind of powerful connections that would recommend him to the unofficial guest list.

“Yes,” Proto says, thinking immediately of the hellish nightmare parking downtown is, before he remembers that as a guest he’s probably going to be able to access a reserved parking space. “I do. When would be most convenient for you?” 

“Well, we would be free to meet after two or later, most likely.” 

“May I bring a colleague?”

“We were assuming you would do so.”

“I will see you at two, then. At Miyazawa.” They exchange pleasantries, and then Proto hangs up. He puts out a general call to Section 9’s field officers as he towels down, squeezing excess moisture out of his long hair with his hands so he can dry it better. “I need someone here who has a business formal suit hanging in their locker, and is willing to put up with a bunch of Korinkai middle management apologizing for calling me a man-whore yesterday afternoon. The upside, we’re eating at Miyazawa, and they’d like to meet us there at 2.”

“Hahaha, no,” Togusa says over cybercomm, “no, I think they wouldn’t deal well with me there.”

“I thought so,” Proto says a little sourly. He tucks the towel around his waist and puts his toiletries back into their net bag, his hair a damp, tousled mess around his head. 

“No, not me,” Paz says from the range, where he still is. “I already did my part passing the gossip on to you.” Proto gets a feeling that Paz’s reluctance to attend an unofficial Korinkai event is probably due to lingering bad blood from the days before he joined up with Section 9. 

“I don’t have any of my suits here,” Batou says. Proto knows intellectually Batou owns some very nice suits that he can be persuaded to wear during exec protect assignments at international summits, but he’s never actually seen Batou in a suit with his own eyes. They are, as he likes to think, Schrödinger’s menswear, hiding in the depths of Batou’s closet.

“Neither do I,” Borma says, too. Borma, another person Proto can’t really imagine in a suit. He’s more likely to visualize the Major in a masculine-styled tailored suit than either Batou or Borma, really. 

“I guess it’s going to have to be me, then.” That would be Saito, who speaks up just as Proto has started combing his long hair out, carefully untangling the ends as he goes. “Unless you want to field this one, Major?”

“No, you go, Saito,” Major Kusanagi says over the comms, “if I went they all might have unfortunate pants-wetting accidents from the time we shut them down over the Jarti incident.”

There’s a chuckle at that, from Ishikawa in the diving room. “I’m going to sit this out. My knees hate tatami flooring, this time of year.”

“Get them replaced, geezer,” Borma interjects, “no reason you have to suffer.” Proto puts his comb away and grabs his toothbrush and toothpaste, starts to eliminate the lingering odor of Everclear from his breath with a thorough brushing.

“I hate the downtime, though,” Ishikawa says, and it’s true. He does make for a terrible patient, so Proto has heard.

— 

Proto’s wearing his glen plaid suit again, with a fresh dress shirt, though, one of his old ones which he keeps in his locker along with a pair of chinos and a spare pair of loafers. It isn’t tailored as closely as his more recent acquisitions, but he hasn’t had the time to go home and get that spare shirt from the closet. He’ll have to visit the shirtmaker and get a few more tailored, and another tie, at least.

Saito has also changed into the suit that he did have hanging on a wooden suit hanger in his locker. It’s a very nice one, Proto thinks, in a smoothly woven wool the color of a mako shark’s slaty blue-gray sides. It’s also rather more Italian in tailoring, featuring a ventless coat with a typically rumpled shoulder. It’s a striking look on Saito’s sleeker build, fits him like a sheath, and is also tailored well enough to hide the knife and the sidearm that Proto knows Saito happens to be carrying — no mean feat when the flat-front trousers are cut closely enough to skim the curves of his thighs and calves. 

“Damn,” Batou says, as they enter the employee break room from the locker room. “Seeing the two of you together like this makes me think we’d probably make bank with a Men of Section 9 calendar. Too bad we’re a classified organization, and it wouldn’t look right if you two wore paper bags over your heads to hide your identities.” 

“Sexualities will be questioned.” And that’s the Major, who has picked up Saito’s discarded newspaper. Proto has no idea why she’s done that. It’s not as though she can’t get the news online, either. 

“You’ve seen me in a suit before,” Proto shrugs.

“And me,” Saito says, following on.

Batou shakes his head. “But not together, like that. It’s the nice suit effect. One man in a nice suit is okay, sure. Multiple men in nice suits all cut attractively but differently makes you think of how each individual tailor chose to highlight each man’s build and figure with each suit. It’s a force-multiplier of hotness.” Batou is entirely right, which makes Proto reassess the seeming casualness of Batou’s daily dress. 

Proto and Saito are each wearing mostly the same articles of clothing — a coat, matching dress trousers, and a dress shirt, with the addition of a necktie in Proto’s case, which Saito has chosen to eschew. But the contrast in styles could not be more pronounced. Proto’s suit was cut along classic English style lines, with sharply creased trousers and stiff canvas construction in the coat, padded and roped sleeve heads to accentuate the breadth of his shoulders, and a nipped-in fit that emphasizes his narrow waist. The tissue sculptors from Locus-Solus gave Proto the build of a suit model. Might as well weaponize it.

Saito’s Italian-style suit, on the other hand, breathes insouciance and freedom of movement, an easy, careless elegance that draws the eye up his toned, muscular legs, to the sharp V-line of his coat and its broad lapels, that makes his slim build look broader, more powerful. It makes Proto feel a bit like a utility knife sitting beside a stiletto, but then Proto chose his suits not to be especially fashionable as Saito has, but rather, to be timeless and classic. 

“Are you questioning your sexuality too?” Proto dares to ask Batou, leaning a little on his lack of affect. It’s nice to be able to be completely straight-faced while saying the most outrageous things. 

Batou snorts. “I was done questioning it years ago, whelp. I’m not so insecure in my masculinity that I can’t call you either of you hot and live with it afterwards.” 

“Ha. Thanks,” Saito says insincerely. 

“A sight like this is one of the few reasons I still work here,” Major Kusanagi says, eyeing both Saito and Proto with a certain amount of satisfaction. Batou remains diplomatically quiet, and Proto chooses to follow his lead. “What?” the Major asks rhetorically, “Ogling me while I’m undercover in a dress is fine, ogling you while you’re all in nice suits isn’t?”

“I try very hard not to think sexual thoughts about you on a daily basis, Major,” Saito says, after a few moments of slightly embarrassed silence, “because I’m fully aware of the terrible, terrible things you could do to my genitals if you were of a mind to do so. And how little actual effort it would take you to do those terrifying things.”

“Well, you’re not very good at it, then,” the Major says, with a little laugh. “But I appreciate the effort on your part.”

—

A notification pings up in Proto’s vision just as he’s pulling into the parking lot at Miyazawa. “We were unable to deliver your item,” it says, and the text scrolling down the small window tells him that a package has arrived for him, but has been left at the nearest konbini for collection, as he hasn’t been home. He probably wouldn’t have been home to collect it either, given the hour, but it does make him want to sigh. He’ll probably have to pick up later, if he manages to make it home this evening. 

His slight annoyance must have shown on his face, because Saito turns to him, raises an eyebrow. 

“It’s nothing,” Proto says, “just a package delivery I missed.”

Saito pauses, thinks. “Don’t you live out in the boondocks?” he asks.

“Yeah,” Proto says. He already knows what the package contains. It’s the sketchbook and pencil set he ordered from an online retailer before he went to bed two nights ago. It’s the only package he’s expecting in the mail, in any event.

“Get your stuff delivered to the HQ,” Saito says with an easy shrug, “it’s not like anyone minds. Batou does that all the time.”

Proto lets out a brief chuckle at that. “I like to pretend I still have a cover identity.” 

“Well, you’re going to have to move somewhere nicer if you want to keep doing that,” Saito says as Proto puts the RX-8 in park. “No way someone living in your current neighborhood could afford a suit from Sawada’s.”

“You can tell?” Proto raises an eyebrow. That’s beyond even him, not without a look at a garment label or whatnot. 

“Caught a glance at the label handsewn on the inside of your coat when you put it on,” Saito says, before he releases his seatbelt. “No, I like to dress well, but I’m nowhere on the level of identifying tailors by their handiwork.”

Proto and Saito are welcomed into Miyazawa with unctuous courtesy, and they shed their shoes and take their seats in a traditional zashiki, floored with glossy gold-green tatami mats. This is the highest and most traditional level of hospitality that the Korinkai would ever show a guest, which indicates to Proto that they are both contrite for the breach of protocol yesterday, and anxious to see the killings resolved without further complication. 

It’s also a subtle test and potential insult all in one, which Proto understands and lets pass. This is an arena where etiquette is everything, where not even a native-born Japanese person might know exactly how to eat and handle each exquisite course served over this long lunch, or be comfortable sitting seiza on a cushion all afternoon. How then, will someone as foreign-looking as Proto handle it? It’s quite fortunate then that Proto is fully equipped to play the passive-aggressive game of proving his right to belong with superior etiquette. 

This lunch meeting also all business, despite the luxury of the rarefied setting — the only staff present are servers, all dressed in traditional kimono, rather than the geiko and maiko who might entertain at a more jovial occasion. Kasuga is present, as are five other men; two of them come up in Proto’s facial recognition program as Korinkai middle-management, and the other three are, from the looks of them, yakuza rank-and-file, who wait politely by their betters. 

No shop talk takes place over the first half of the meal, only insincere comments about the dismal weather and the quality of the winter seafood — served in bite-size servings, a traditional appetizer of Miyagi oyster, served on the half-shell on a bed of ice, with a drizzle of ponzu sauce; a single perfect bite of yellowfin tuna on a mound of vinegared rice; translucent petals of fugu served with the highly toxic ovaries of said pufferfish, brined and pickled in sake lees to leach out most of the tetrodotoxin. 

The pufferfish shows back up in the naka-choko, a palate cleanser, where its bones have been simmered into a clear broth seasoned with the zest of satsuma oranges. Its skin, denuded of spikes, has been seasoned and crisped with a hand-held propane torch, and is left floating delicately in the bowl of broth. The yakimono, or grilled course, is a highly illegal endangered bluefin tuna collar, seasoned with hand-harvested salt and dried yuzu peel, another challenge to the presumed eating habits of Westerners, since the choicest part of the meat remains in a pocket tucked away between bone, difficult for non-chopstick implements to extract. 

It isn’t until the rice course — takikomi gohan cooked with rare and expensive dried matsutake mushrooms, spicy and earthy, odorous, with a fragrance that could be described as “challenging” to a Western palate — that anyone says anything more meaningful than a pleasantry.

Proto has never had the middle finger raised in his direction with such subtlety and style, and he notes it with equal parts annoyance and admiration. This isn’t Kasuga’s idea, he thinks, subtlety is not the man’s forte, even if he has plenty of style. Instead he eyes one of the other middle-ranking yakuza in the room, a man who his facial recognition program flags as Naoto Tachibana. Proto takes a nanosecond to go over Tachibana’s dossier while lingering politely over bites of perfectly cooked rice. Third generation Korinkai. Harvard MBA. A specialist in shady real estate and fiduciary laundering. His mother, according to the dossier, is the daughter of a kazoku family fallen on hard times — the kazoku were the Japanese hereditary peerage, abolished by the Constitution of 1947. 

And it is Tachibana who breaks the bland conversation as they all wait for the plates to be cleared by silent, efficient servers, and the next course to be brought. “I was personally against any further contact with Section 9, Mr. Iwasaki,” he says, his voice soft, velvety, seductively gentle. “But I am glad to see that they have sent someone with good manners.” 

“I try,” Proto says, as a server refills his cup with warmed sake. Neither the alcohol nor the trace amounts of tetrodotoxin in the fugu can affect his metabolism, quite fortunately, and a quick mental glance at Saito’s status satisfies him that his colleague is remaining alert and on guard. 

“I suppose I should not have judged you by appearances, or your relative inexperience, I’m sorry to say.” This is something Proto takes note of. He’s aware that the Korinkai keep tabs on Niihama prefectural police investigators, but it’s rather harder to assemble dossiers on Section 9 field officers, for valid and important security reasons. 

“Ishikawa, are you listening in?” Proto asks mentally, on cybercomm.

“No, patch me in. What’s up?” Ishikawa asks. Another nanosecond thought allows Proto to know that Ishikawa has just climbed into a chair in the diving room. 

“Mr. Tachibana says, and I paraphrase, that he knows I’m a newcomer to Section 9. If the Korinkai has dossiers on us, I think we should probably find out what they think they know.” 

“On it. Keep me on your feed.” 

“Of course.” Proto betrays no hint of the conversation that has just happened, and only blinks once, naturally, and nods politely to a server, who has brought the next course. 

“Appearances are much less reliable nowadays, with the accessibility of full body prosthetics,” Proto suggests gently. What he has just been served is a single, translucent cube of yokan, a dessert jelly made of red beans and sugar, topped with a perfect sliver of candied apple. The confection is almost too beautiful to eat, sitting as it does on a single, unblemished mint leaf, but eat it he does, in a single bite. 

“Of course. I should have thought of that,” Tachibana says. “I suppose you were investigating something in Bertarve before this case, then. You’d fit in well there,” he says, before he is nudged gently by the man sitting to his left, a man who Proto’s facial recognition software identifies as Jun Uematsu. Proto can’t read thoughts, but he can read human body language fairly well, since he has an analysis suite installed. _Haven’t you finished taking the measure of him?_ Uematsu’s gestures say. _Enough with the sparring, and on to the business._

Uematsu is, according to the dossier Section 9 holds on him, somewhere around Kasuga’s rank, and is involved largely in vice. The two of them probably roped Tachibana in for respectability’s sake and didn’t expect him to spend the entire meal quietly insulting the Section 9 field officer whose decision it is to leave the yakuza-owned clubs alone. But Proto also knows far better than to burn bridges like that, based on what is ultimately a meaningless slight delivered in the form of a very, very good meal. Tachibana is a petty little man who overestimates his own power, in the grand scheme of things, and who places too much value on nationalism. 

The servers retreat with the empty plates, again, and sake cups are refilled yet again, and now Uematsu takes the lead. He’s going to be the reasonable cop to Tachibana’s bad cop, Proto thinks, in contrast to Kasuga’s coarse friendliness. Part of this decision comes from the many ways he can analyze human behavior, but another part of it comes from pure intuition, from the many observations he has made within the halls of power, as Chief Aramaki’s aide. 

“Forgive me if my understanding of events is incomplete,” Proto says very quietly, to forestall more polite insults, “but I believe this was supposed to be a working lunch.” 

Saito, seated to Proto’s left, raises a single eyebrow as Uematsu reaches into his coat. Proto’s enhanced reflexes activate, and time slows subjectively for him. Seconds tick by, slow and leisurely, syrupy as his built-in analysis software breaks down the body language of everyone in the room. The yakuza soldiers are motionless, their postures stiff, alert, but not alarmed. Uematsu is not going for a weapon, and Proto is about 86% certain of it. 

“Weapons tight,” Proto thinks at Saito over cybercomm, just as he registers the bunching in Saito’s thighs, the tension in his neck and shoulders as he sucks in a quick breath. A flash of crimson gleams richly in the room’s warm lighting, the fine silk lining of Uematsu’s coat, as he draws out a small, flat package wrapped in silk. Proto deactivates his enhanced reflexes then, lets time snap back to its normal flow. Proto feels the shift in Saito’s weight as he disguises his start as a small, casual movement, readjusting the way his weight sits on his shins and knees. 

“This is surveillance data. Private, you understand, from our own network.” Uematsu says, as he slides the package across the table to Proto, who picks it up left-handed and slides it into a coat pocket without even checking. Doing so would be insulting to his hosts. 

“From the seven clubs where android hosts were destroyed.” 

“Yes. And a guest list from the three clubs that keep such a thing. It might be incomplete. People who visit such establishments don’t often use their real names.”

“I understand.” Proto glances across the table at Kasuga, who looks as though he’s about to burst from a blend of suppressed nerves and frustration. “Thank you very much for your help on this case,” Proto says, despite the fact that it is in the Korinkai’s best interest to cooperate with Section 9, and that he has spent an entire afternoon being insulted. “It was a feast.” They don’t have to like him, but he can still shame them with his good manners. 

“We do hope this incident is resolved sooner rather than later,” Kasuga manages to say, with a polite bow. 

Proto returns the gesture, rises effortlessly, and leaves. He slides his feet into his boots outside the room, zips them back up, and leaves the restaurant without a second glance.

“Could you drive, Saito?” Proto asks, once they’re back at the Mazda. “I want to go over this information.”

“Don’t dive and drive, right,” Saito says. “Give me a minute. My foot’s fallen asleep and I’ve been dying trying not to let it show. I haven’t spent this much time in seiza since aikido classes when I was in high school.” Proto climbs into the passenger seat and passes the keys over to Saito, who adjusts the driver’s seat and rear-view mirror to his satisfaction. 

“Ishikawa,” Proto says over cyber-comm, “status report?” 

“Yeah,” Ishikawa says from the diving room, where he’s been for the past two hours or so, “about the Korinkai holding dossiers on us — they’ve got a supposed organization chart that’s pretty hilarious, seeing as they think the Major’s either not really a woman, or not really human.” 

“Why am I not surprised to hear that?” That’s the Major, who has been listening quietly in on the shared conversation. 

“They also think you’re not actually in charge.” Ishikawa may sound a little too amused for his own good, at that.

“So who do they think is boss?” the Major asks tartly. Proto can imagine her crushing an aluminum can into an ingot with pure rage, at this point. 

“Togusa,” Ishikawa says “They’re still trying to figure out who the hell you are, Proto. They think your workname is a legal fiction, which I guess it is, but they also think you’re some kind of imported assassin from the Russian mob.”

Proto takes the unmarked data storage disc out of the silk cloth it was wrapped in, and inserts it into the media player on the passenger side of the RX-8, plugs himself into it. “Hence this whole lunch being a test in Japanese etiquette and that ham-fisted reference to Etorofu. How unfair. I’m a domestic product of this country.” He goes over the files with a quick flick of his mind, noting hours and hours of surveillance video… and yes, a partial guest list, three of them. Also, a cyberbrain virus, a subtle one, more of a bugging program than anything seriously hostile, but his defenses flag and disable it before it can even execute itself. Cute. He’s going to have to confer with the Major in private about how daring the Korinkai are feeling this time. 

“Ha.” That’s Saito, who has turned the key in the ignition. “Incidentally, I don’t think that poor tuna died well. I can’t imagine I’m saying this after such a fancy lunch, but I’m actually still hungry.”

“Well,” Proto thinks, as he unplugs himself from the media player, unwilling to go further without some additional hardware between his neurochip and any other possible viruses hidden in the data, “according to my calculations, lunch amounted to maybe a dozen bites of meat, seafood, and vegetables, a small bowl of rice, and about 2 deciliters of broth. That’s hardly enough to meet the caloric expenditure of a trained operator on a cold winter day.”

“Let’s stop for burgers and shakes on the way back to HQ,” Saito suggests silently.

Proto answers him with the mental equivalent of a shrug. “You’re driving, so sure. Anyone want us to bring something back?”

“Yeah, give me a minute,” Ishikawa says, “let me think.” 

_Better a dinner of fast food where true companions are, than a stalled ox where hatred is,_ Proto thinks to himself, paraphrasing the Biblical verse, as he settles down in the passenger seat, and lets Saito drive this time. The RX-8 growls assertively as they pull out of the parking lot, its ghostly paint job gleaming like a fish in water, against the lengthening shadows of the short winter afternoon.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you're wondering whether I do have a watch in mind for Proto, yes, I do. I think he should own a 50s to 60s Tissot Millitär, worn with a matte black steel or ceramic wristband, face inwards to the wrist like the Major wears hers. :3


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Proto finally makes a breakthrough in the android mutilations case, but with that breakthrough comes some unwelcome knowledge about his self. Nevertheless, he strives on, because he's not in this alone, and the rest of Section 9 have his back. 
> 
> A shorter chapter, but one packed full of goodness. 
> 
> Content warning: Discussion of a queer person murdered due to homophobia  
> Content warning: Proto pretty much has a tiny nervous breakdown from stress

This is the second night that Proto has spent in his office, but he’s a little too busy to care. The remains of his dinner sit on his desk, an empty styrofoam bowl from a local gyudon fast-food place, dropped off by Borma after a late dinner run. He’s been diving the Korinkai servers with Ishikawa — something Section 9 is doing just for fun after yesterday afternoon’s passive-aggressive lunch of insults. 

Proto is too busy to be upset about how lunch went, though. Viruses aside, the data from the Korinkai bars is an absolute goldmine of information. He’s cross-referenced the guest lists with the national police violent offenders database and gleaned a few names to follow up on, and part of his mind is busying itself with compiling their dossiers. The bulk of his computational ability, however, is focused on scanning the IR footage from the various bars frame by frame, focusing on the hours before the android bodies were found and reported to the police. 

Proto can feel that he’s onto something. He just can’t articulate what, yet. He’s changed out of his suit yet again, to give it a proper rest, and he’s wearing a pair of chinos and a t-shirt while the rest of his washable garments are being laundered by an Operator android. He’s starting to get hungry again, seeing that his late dinner was roughly 5 hours ago, at 8:25PM, and a bowl of gyudon and a bowl of miso soup don’t go that far towards fulfilling his general energy requirements. 

Proto thinks about heading back to his locker to take a swig of grain liquor — it’s pure calories, in his case, but it doesn’t really taste all that good, which was something he had thought about, just to deter anyone from getting smart and siphoning the occasional tipple off his emergency fuel supply. Instead, he stands up, leaving the image analysis and information compiling operations running in the back of his consciousness, and hauls his rain jacket over his t-shirt, to hide his shoulder holster and disguise his indifference to the cold. It’s dried out tonight, at least, but a lot of the slush and snow has frozen hard, making sidewalks treacherous. 

Proto doesn’t really have to go that far to find food, though. He zips his coat halfway up and buckles its belt, then sends a general message over to the rest of the team members who are still at Section 9 HQ. That would be Ishikawa, Borma, and the Chief. Proto hesitates for a nanosecond, before adding Chief Aramaki to their silent conference anyway. It’s after hours, and a slight amount of informality is tolerated in this case. 

“I’m going to hit up a konbini for something to eat while I work on these surveillance videos. Can I get any of you anything while I’m there?” he asks everyone in general. 

“Yeah, come to think of it,” Borma says, “I’d like some nikuman.”

“Yeah, nikuman for the both of us,” Ishikawa agrees. “Maybe a platter of shumai.” 

“Okay, nikuman for two, shumai. Chief, may I get you anything?”

“Hm.” Aramaki’s mental voice sounds weary, querulous. Proto knows that the Chief and the Major have been wrestling with budget matters, despite their very recent successes at unraveling the Cabinet Intelligence Service’s Individual Eleven plot. Nevertheless, the Prime Minister’s budgeting committee is being slightly tight-fisted, if only because Section 9 has taken significant losses over the course of the year. 

The bill for Proto’s emergency repairs runs into the millions of yen, for one, and there’s the freshly replaced tiltrotor, after the previous one got blown up by a suicide bomber in Bertarve. The new Uchikoma think tanks, a fresh recruitment effort to try and pad out their operational strength. That’s all a lot to ask for, from politicians who usually have no idea of the daily costs incurred by a public security agency like Section 9. “A tray of gyoza, if you please, Proto,” he says at last. “See if you can get extra sauce for them. Thank you.” 

“On my way,” Proto thinks aloud, and he steps into the elevator leading to the fake lobby downstairs, and from there to the public access elevators that lead down to the street level. The building is silent and dark, locked up for the evening, and Proto navigates partly via low-light vision, and partly from reflexive familiarity with the place he has worked all eighteen months of his life. 

The street is not entirely silent. Even in mid-winter there are still some nighthawks wandering the streets of Niihama City. Some are drunk salarymen stumbling their way home. Others are night-shift workers on their way back from food breaks. Proto is just another person on the street, ignored by all, until he enters the welcoming oasis of a konbini. It’s bright inside, and an android worker greets him as he steps in and the door chimes its alarm. He picks out his selections — the shumai and gyoza come from the cold case, and the nikuman are kept hot on a steamer table. For himself he picks up some kare pan — delicious deep-fried buns filled with a dry curry filling.

A motorcycle courier parks outside the konbini just as Proto has finished paying for his snacks, and he waits politely for them to pass him by before he heads out the door. 

_Wait._

Something clicks in his head, like a camera shutter. 

_A courier._

This one’s a young man, bundled up against the biting wind outside, and he drops off several packages for customer pickup — it’s a service that many konbini offer, that reminds Proto of the package he has yet to pick up at the konbini near his apartment block. He summons his image analysis subroutine to the forefront of his consciousness, pulls several relevant images together to compare them side by side, and a sharp jolt of clarity fills his mind as he makes the connection. 

There’s a konbini beside every single bar or establishment where a body was found. All run by the same corporation, if by different franchisees. Who would have a reason to pass by one of those places all day long, all across Niihama City? A courier, that’s who, because it’s deliveries like these that keep the logistical operations going 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. 

Proto breaks into a brisk walk, and then a jog, and a trot, and he’s sprinting by the time he crosses the empty road between the konbini and the building Section 9 HQ is in. There is fortunately nobody to care that he is jaywalking, and he doesn’t get hit by an oncoming truck. He needs to get back to his office. He needs to refer back to his simulation and find out which logistics companies service that particular corporation’s konbini, and if a specific courier company handles each and every one of those stores. He has to know, and he has to know _now._ He fumbles the card swipe at the front door of the HQ building, forces himself to slow down to an unhurried pace, and paces back and forth as a human might while the elevator goes slowly up and up. 

“I’m sorry, everyone,” he thinks into the shared conference, still up, on his cybercomm. “I’m leaving your snacks in the break room, because I need to be back at my office right now. I’m sure you can ask an Operator to heat the shumai and gyoza up in a microwave and deliver them to you.”

“Something happen?” Ishikawa asks, concerned.

“Yes,” Proto thinks back. “I’ve just had a breakthrough on my case, I’m very sorry.” 

— 

Proto isn’t driven by adrenaline, it’s just not something that happens despite his body’s hybrid construction, and so he retains the presence of mind to eat his supper while he manipulates the petabytes of data at his disposal. Crumbs of deep-fried panko land on the front of his t-shirt, and he brushes absently at them as he compares his findings and requests more information on the net. Frustratingly enough, the names of shipping and logistics companies servicing each konbini are not available online. It’s not anything privileged. It’s just so mundane, so normal, so boring, that nobody cares to put it up. Who would care?

To the average inhabitant of Niihama City, the shadow economy of contract and gig workers who deliver their groceries and packages, and who drop off orders of take out are entirely beneath notice, and they’re mostly human too, because most AI is still not sufficiently complex enough to respond to logistical needs as complicated and complex as those that would be required to keep goods and services flowing in a densely populated metropolis. 

Moreover, this is the wee hours of the night, and most konbini franchise owners, like any other civilian, would be tucked safe and warm in bed, sleeping like infants, and Proto would not be able to get hold of them without significant complaint. He tries anyway, calling each konbini by each crime scene, and is answered by an android worker each time. They offer to let him leave a message, and he does, using his workname, asking for the owner to call him back at their earliest convenience, which is most likely 8 to 10 AM, a sane hour for most people to be awake, unlike him and his coworkers at Section 9, who are on call all the time, it seems.

Except, of course, for Kokei Yo’s little konbini right beside Kasuga’s host club. She doesn’t make enough to hire android staff, and therefore Proto’s call is answered by a human person on the other end. “Hello,” a familiar voice says, creaky, a little sniffly, “this is Kokei Yo. How may I help you?”

“Mrs. Yo,” Proto says, his relief and delight leaking through his voice — he would probably get up from his chair and dance if he were more demonstrative, but he is not — ”I am ever so glad to hear you. This is Hajime Iwasaki, from Public Security Section 9.” 

“Ah, yes,” Yo says, and he can see the smile crinkling up her face. He doesn’t know why he likes the little old woman, just that he does, and talking to her always brightens his day. Or early morning, in this case. “What has you up so late, young man?”

“I have a question for you, it’s about the case I’m working on.” 

“Yes?”

“Can you list the logistics companies that handle deliveries to your franchise, and what time they make their deliveries? Please include couriers who drop off and pick up packages as well, that sort of thing.”

“Right… I’ve got it on a ledger, please wait. We’re a bit old-fashioned here.”

“I understand,” Proto says. He stands up from his office chair and begins to pace the length of his office, which isn’t that much once you account for the room his L-shaped desk takes up, as well as the two office chairs in the room. He would have tried to dive Mrs. Yo’s files from sheer impatience, except of course, he can’t. Not with a hardcopy ledger. 

There’s a sound of rustling paper on the other end, pages flapping and rustling indefinitely. “Right,” Yo says on the other end, “we get our fresh food straight from our licensor, Circle J, they have trucks come straight from the factory kitchens. But dry goods are usually handled by ConEx Logistics, and the package post is usually by freelancers who hire out to Matka Post.”

“Would those be the same companies handling shipping and deliveries to other franchises in the city, would you know?” Proto asks her. He sincerely hopes that’s the case, although he can’t imagine why it wouldn’t be. It would be far more convenient for him if it were. 

There’s a second of silence, and then another one, before Yo answers. “As far as I know, yes.”

“Thank you so very much, Mrs. Yo,” Proto tells her, with absolute sincerity. “You may have just helped me solve my case.”

“Oh, is that so?” she asks, sounding just a little proud. “Well, I’m glad to help. But you ought to get some sleep, dear. Staying up all night makes you age early.”

“I’ll be fine, really,” he tells her. “Thank you again.”

“Good bye.”

—

It’s almost 7 in the morning by the time Proto has managed to chase down human staff at each logistics company who will actually talk to him on the case. He’s managed to request delivery schedules and pickups for each of the konbini in question, and a list of staffers who would have handled those deliveries. That done, he cross-referenced the schedules to the suspected time of deactivation for each of the androids found at each crime scene, and there it is, clear as the morning sun in a cloudless sky. A courier from Matka Post had done a pickup or drop-off at each konbini in the hours before each body was found, and the same courier, at that. A woman named Ayumi Shibata. Proto checks her name against the national police database and comes up with practically nothing, no traffic tickets, no criminal history. She has no social media account, either, which is uncommon in 2033.

Proto considers the possibility that the name is a pseudonym, and then tosses it aside. Presentation of valid ID is required to work most jobs in Niihama City, even gig economy jobs, especially with package delivery, so as to make investigation and prosecution easier in the case of mail tampering and employee theft. No, she’s just the kind of “quiet and keeps to herself” that sometimes winds up on the news for mass murder or serial killing, Proto thinks. He cross-references the information from her new employee paperwork, kindly supplied by Matka Post, on civilian databases, and gets more hits.

Ayumi Shibata, born 2007 in Kobe. Graduated high school in Osaka, never entered university, returned to the Kobe region in 2028, if the rental records have it right, and then moved to Niihama City in 2030. She had one older brother, Satoshi Shibata, born 2005, listed deceased in 2031. Satoshi’s name comes up in the police database, not as an offender, but as the victim in a homicide investigation. Proto uses his credentials and requests the file over formal channels, receives permission to download it a nanosecond later. 

It’s a ghastly case, one that Proto missed by virtue of not having existed during its investigation. Satoshi had propositioned, or been propositioned by some violent homophobes, and been lured off with the promise of a hookup, only to be tortured slowly to death over a period of days. It never hit the front pages, of course, because of the taboo subject. And because, Proto suspects, there are probably some people who still think queer people ought to be killed, even now. 

Proto is not someone who flinches at violence or its aftermath, but the autopsy records fill him with a powerful sense of discomfort and helpless anger. But it’s what Proto finds elsewhere in the police files that makes him flinch. Satoshi had been working as a model at the time of his death, and there are glamor shots of his handsome face in the records, a stark contrast to how he looked, bloated, burned, lacerated, after his death and a not-insignificant immersion in the waters around Niihama City. But that contrast is not what makes Proto flinch. It’s a similarity. It’s recognition. Because Proto recognizes the bone structure he and Satoshi have in common, the set of their eyes, the clean lines of their jawlines. It’s as though someone took a photo of Satoshi and manipulated it slightly, cleaning up his browline, widening his mouth somewhat, enhancing his cheekbones, to create the face that Proto wears today. 

_No,_ Proto thinks. He thinks of the breakfast he ate, the first day he was conscious after being repaired in Harima, and of the doctoral research fellow who made his meal with her own hands. Shiori. She told him the story of how he came by his face, of how he was based on the older brother of a friend she had lost contact with. Proto thinks of the bottles of grain liquor in his locker, and for the first time in the eighteen months of his existence, wishes very much that he could get absofuckinglutely shit-faced drunk right now. But he does not have that option, so instead, he stands back up from his office chair and takes the elevator up to the penthouse pool in the HQ, stares out at the windows at the brightening skyline. 

The sight of the pale winter sun makes it easier somehow for Proto to make the next step, and he does. He searches for Shiori’s name, and finds her contact information. Dials the number mentally. The phone rings twice, thrice, before someone picks up on the other hand. “Matsuda,” someone says drowsily on the other end. It’s Shiori’s voice, however. 

“I’m dreadfully sorry to wake you up, Shiori, but it’s me, Proto,” he says soundlessly, with his hands clasped behind his back, as though he were standing at parade rest, because that’s the only way he can still the impulse to pace restlessly back and forth

“Oh.” There’s a soft clatter, the sound of sheets rustling, and he knows that she is sitting up in bed, searching for her glasses. “What do you need from me? Is it an emergency?”

“No,” Proto says, glad of how easy it is for him to keep his voice neutral and businesslike. “I’m working a case, and I need some information from you. It’s nothing you’ve done, just something I need for confirmation.”

“Confirmation?” Shiori sounds confused, and he can’t blame her. “Okay. What is it?”

Proto feels something stirring inside, an uneasy blend of rage and unease. “That friend you told me you had, in middle school. The one who moved away. What was her name?” 

“Ayumi. Why?”

Proto closes his eyes, lets his head hang low on his neck as he registers the impact of her words, but he forges ahead nevertheless. “Her brother. His name was Satoshi, right? Satoshi Shibata.”

“... why, yes. Proto, why are you asking me this? Is he — are they okay?” Shiori is somehow managing to keep calm, but it’s a veneer, Proto can tell, laid over growing panic, and he knows there’s nothing he can do to assuage her fears, not really. And the truth would be worse, even if he could share it with her. This is knowledge he’ll have to bear alone, for now.

“I can’t tell you right now, Shiori, but thank you. Thank you very much.” This is all he can say to her, which he regrets.

“Please don’t run off and do something dangerous, Proto.” Shiori’s worry for Proto makes him feel oddly sick, nauseous, and he logs it in an internal memorandum file, because he has never felt this discomfited before. 

“I can’t do that,” he says after a few seconds have passed. “It’s my job. But I’ll be careful.”

“Please.” 

“Bye.” Proto terminates the call before she can ask any more favors of him, because he knows he will probably not be able to tell her that Ayumi is okay. Ayumi might have never been okay, not since she lost her brother two years ago, and she is most definitely not okay now. And it’s Proto’s job to go out and stop her from doing more harm. 

Someone less together would have let loose a string of profanities and probably punched the glass wall sealing the swimming pool off from the outside world. Proto can’t do that. He’s strong enough that he might actually damage the safety glass, and that’s coming straight out of his salary, and he’ll probably get written up for it. Instead he turns away from the shamelessly beautiful view outside and closes his eyes, fights the sensation of tears beginning to well up in his eyes and fails.

This is only the second time he has shed tears in his life, and he scrubs furiously away at his face with the back of a hand, finds the strands of his hair sticking to the moisture on his face despite his efforts. And then he forces himself to take a deep breath, another, and then another, until his pulse begins to slow to its normal 40 beats per minute, and his hands begin to unclench. 

Proto can have his own emotional breakdown later. Right now he has work to do. He feels as though he doesn’t belong in his own skin, for the first time in his life. As though it’s too tight for him, packed too much with emotion that threatens to burst forth. And he can’t work like this, so he reaches out in his thoughts, and dials down the intensity of his feelings. 

Proto has never done this before, but it’s always an option he has had control over. The unease and nausea recedes, as does the rage. They haven’t gone away, per se, and he will still feel those feelings later. But he has muted them for now, silenced them in the same way he can turn off his sense of pain so that he can keep fighting and working under duress. He is cool, calm, and very light, his thoughts sharp and clean as he takes the elevator down to the floor his office is on. He has a job to do. 

—

Proto opens a direct message channel to the field officers at Section 9. “Major,” he sends directly, “I think I may have identified the suspect in the mutilations. I’m going to need backup to bring her in. Ideally I’d like to do it soon, within the next hour, before she leaves her apartment to go to work.”

“Understood, Proto,” the Major says. “I’m en route to the HQ right now. Are Borma or Ishikawa still there?”

“I don’t think so, Major,” Proto answers. “They went home around 4 or 5 AM last night, after diving through the Korinkai servers.”

“Damn,” the Major thinks. “Who’s nearby? Togusa? Saito?”

“Not me, I’m still at home,” Saito sends. “I can be there in twenty, if you want.” 

“I am,” Paz says, “I’m pulling into the parking garage now.” 

“Paz, back Proto up on the arrest, pull in prefectural police support if you need it,” the Major says, “but make sure our own techs handle the forensics. Will you need any specialized equipment?”

“No, I don’t think so,” Proto says. “Our sidearms will do. But we’ll probably want to take her alive for questioning. I’m forwarding a dossier now.” With that he uploads the folder he’s compiled on Ayumi Shibata with a thought. 

“Ok, you two, you have my authorization,” the Major says. “Go ahead and do it, before you run out of time. I’ll have the Chief hose the deck down if the PD gets pissy.” 

“They shouldn’t, Major.” That’s Togusa. “They seemed like they were going to wash their hands of the case when they handed it over to us.”

“You say that now,” Proto says, “but our suspect is the sister of the guy who was tortured to death two years ago. The ‘gay murder’ case.”

“Damn,” Togusa says. It’s almost as though he’s breathing the word on a long exhale, which is not the case, since they don’t use their lungs or vocal chords over cybercomm. “That one was ugly, and I don’t really feel like they did their due diligence on it, either.” 

“I know,” Proto said. “I took a look at the Niihama PD records on the case earlier.” 

“Come to think of it, Proto, you look kind of like—”

“I know,” Proto thinks, cutting Togusa off a little rudely. “But this isn’t the time to discuss it.” 

Paz saves the day, before Togusa can continue pursuing what is currently a very uncomfortable topic for Proto. “In the elevator now, Proto. See you in the armory.” 

“See you there,” Proto says, and he cuts the call. 

—

Neither Paz nor Proto are armed for bear, when they arrive at Ayumi Shibata’s miniscule apartment, not when their suspect is a civilian who has disposed of her android targets with a hatchet or a cleaver. They’re both wearing stab-proof vests under their shirts, however, just in case things go wronger than usual. Things have usually already gone wrong when Section 9 shows up at your doorstep, guns drawn. It’s a sad little place in a dingy little building, the kind of one-room mansion that’s only 9 meters squared, and Proto knows something is profoundly wrong with the place the moment he comes up to the door. 

Underneath the stale smells of uncollected trash is a cloying, sweetish smell that he knows very well, because that’s what his own blood smells like. It’s not entirely the same stuff, of course, as what flows in the veins of a mass-market android. His blood is doped with micromachines and nano-corpuscles and engineered stem cells that allow him to heal and regenerate over time. But there’s enough similarity in its composition that he recognizes the smell instantly. 

His skin feels like something is crawling under it, and he knows it’s not a physical sensation, because it doesn’t register on his diagnostics at all. No, it’s just a sense of unease that is almost physical, which means that he’s started feeling emotions fully again. Proto is not allowed to turn his emotions entirely off — he has always been meant to be an AI that thinks and feels, because emotions are an important part of his decision-making algorithms. But he mutes them again, and banishes also the annoying alarm that has just popped up in his consciousness, as his body demands he rest again. 

Proto hasn’t time to do this. He stands to the right of the door, his Seburo M5 drawn, and nods to Paz, who has taken the other side of the door. They’re not going to knock. He takes hold of the doorknob with his left hand, exerts enough strength to force the flimsy lock, and then pushes the door in before anyone inside can react. His heightened reflexes are fully engaged, and the seconds tick by at quarter-time as he slices the pie, covering the narrow space beyond the door in the thin arc of the world covered by his gunsights, from right to left.

Paz, behind him, moves to cover him as he checks the apartment’s miniscule bathroom, but it is empty. The apartment is empty too, and Ayumi Shibata is nowhere to be seen. There’s a lumpy collection of shapes under a tarpaulin under the loft she sleeps in, and Proto does not have to look to know what’s under there. 

“Clear,” Proto says over cybercomm. 

“Clear,” Paz says in reply. 

Proto holsters his sidearm and pulls on a pair of latex gloves, reaches up to feel the unmade bed on the loft, finds a vestige of warmth left in the sheets. “Major,” he thinks over their communications link, “our suspect isn’t here, but she may have just left recently, her mattress is still warm.” 

“Shower stall’s still wet,” Paz says silently. “We probably just missed her.” 

“I’ve got her work schedule for the day,” Proto thinks, forwarding it with a thought. “Can we get surveillance coverage at the logistics company and the various konbini she’s supposed to deliver to today?”

“Calling it in,” Togusa says over comms. “I’ll liaise with the PD if we need more bodies than we’ve got. Sending a forensics crew your way, Proto.”

“Thank you,” Proto thinks. “They’re going to be quite busy, I think.” He kneels down before the tarp on the scuffed linoleum floor, notes that it’s laid over another one. 

“What have we got?” That’s the Major, just as Proto picks up a corner of the topmost tarpaulin and flips it over. 

“Solid evidence of each and every android mutilation on our list,” Proto says, forwarding a record from his own visual memory. There’s a head, yes, a pair of legs. Shins. Feet. Poor Sho’s hands on the truncated stumps of his wrists. Internals. The parts are all laid out in rough anatomical order, although Proto knows full well that it’s a mechanical impossibility to assemble any kind of working body, android or otherwise, from these orphaned parts. They weren’t disassembled cleanly enough, and the hardware doesn’t match anyway. 

Why would Ayumi Shibata have done this? Proto wonders. It’s a good thing android body parts don’t rot, per se. Their musculature is too artificial to actually decay. The material deteriorates, yes, but it doesn’t decompose. Not in a way that smells bad, fortunately.

“That’s messed up,” Paz says, shaking his tousled head, as Proto climbs back onto his feet. 

“Yeah. Yeah, it is,” he says in reply. 

It isn’t until Proto passes the tiny bathroom in Shibata’s apartment that an answer comes to him, on why she had mutilated those androids, and it’s his own ghostly reflection in the moisture-beaded mirror that helps him connect the thoughts. Satoshi Shibata had been a model. What kind of model? 

He searches through the police files again as he steps out of the apartment, to give the forensics techs room to work, and it isn’t until he’s climbed back in the driver’s seat of the RX-8 that he finds the answer he’s looking for. 

_Of course he has,_ Proto thinks. Satoshi Shibata did mostly fashion modelling. A few gay pinup shoots, nothing more raunchy than swimsuit and underwear work. But the bulk of his income came from licensure deals through his modelling agency, to the makers and sculptors of androids and prosthetic bodies. Satoshi Shibata had himself scanned in a laser-assisted 3D booth, and then licensed the likeness of his own face and body to the makers of such shells. How must it feel to be his bereaved sister, confronted constantly by faces and hands and bodies like his all the time? That, Proto realizes, must have tipped Ayumi over the edge into violence. She wants her big brother back.

In that case, he thinks, she will return to her apartment, because that’s where she has the relics — the android parts that bear his likeness — in storage. 

“Togusa,” Proto thinks speechlessly over cybercomm, “we’re going to want a surveillance detail on Ayumi Shibata’s apartment. She’ll probably want to come back here.” 

“You think so?” Togusa asks. He’s asking for more information, as opposed to doubting outright.

“Yeah,” Proto thinks. The world feels oddly unreal to him, and the damned alarm in his head is going off again. He banishes it. “I’ll tell you why when I’m back at HQ. Unless I’m needed for surveillance work right now.” 

“No,” Togusa says, “we’ve got coverage from Niihama PD. Detective Aizawa was the first to volunteer. She’s got a lot of faith in you. But Batou wants to talk to you. In person.”

“Understood.” Proto climbs out of the RX-8 and climbs the two flights of stairs back up to the apartment, where Paz is keeping guard over the forensics techs. 

“Can you get a ride back to HQ with the techs?” Proto asks him, and he does so in person because this request is going to inconvenience Paz somewhat. 

“Sure, I can, yeah,” Paz nods, reasonably enough. “You need to be somewhere else?”

“Batou wants to talk to me face-to-face. Don’t know why,” Proto shrugs. He has no idea why Batou would need to speak with him one-to-one instead of over cybercomm. 

“Someone’s in trouble,” Paz says, with just a hint of black humor. He tries to light one of his cigarettes, and the lighter flame goes out in the wind. He squints, annoyed, and then tries again, and the cherry on the cigarette flares up between his cupped hands. “Go. Get yourself back to HQ.” Paz says around the cigarette still in his mouth, wisps of smoke leaking out of his nose and between his lips, to be snatched away by the hungry wind. “And — I didn’t think it’d ever show since you’re synthetic, Proto, but you look like hell.”

“Good, because that’s how I feel.” And feel like hell he does. A ringtone plays out in his head, and he glances at the caller ID, realizes that the first of the other eight konbini franchise owners has started to call him back. Proto doesn’t have the energy or bandwidth to do this right now, he really doesn’t. But he picks up, and says politely, “Good morning. Hajime Iwasaki, Public Security Section 9. Yes, I left a message with your worker very early this morning.” 

—

Proto finds Batou waiting for him in his office when he gets back to HQ, and he knows that because Batou had explicitly told an Operator android to wait for Proto in the elevator lobby and tell him where to go the moment he stepped out of it. This does not fill Proto with confidence, even while he struggles to figure out what he could have done wrong. 

But Batou’s body language is relaxed, his hands resting loosely in his lap as he sits in the second office chair in Proto’s office. “Close that door, will you?” Batou says, “This is gonna be a private discussion.”

Proto does so, and sits down in his own chair. The alarm in his head goes off again, and he silences it yet again. “I’m trying to remember what I’ve done that’s landed me in trouble.”

“Trouble?” Batou asks, raising a brow. “You’re not in trouble, not really.”

“Oh.” Proto wants to slump in his chair, but that’s going to betray how tired he’s beginning to feel, which is odd for him. His biocells are fully charged, and he normally only starts to feel weary only after he’s down to a 30% charge or less. 

“Firstly: you need to eat something, so here.” Batou pulls something out of a pocket of his coat, tosses it over to Proto, who makes the catch automatically despite his fatigue. The small, dense object rustles in a slick plastic wrapper, and Proto holds it in his hand, looks down at it. It’s a cyborg meal bar similar to the ones he eats for breakfast, to supplement his unique nutritional and caloric requirements that remain unmet by normal food.

“Thanks,” Proto sighs. He begins to tear the wrapper open, takes a first bite, and washes it down with his coffee, long grown cold. Disgusting. But he does need the fuel. 

“Secondly, I’ve checked your work logs, and you’ve been on duty for three days and two nights.” Batou is not admonishing him, no, just talking it out like a reasonable person, as though two hours of sleep over seventy-two hours is a reasonable amount of sleep for anyone, even an advanced AI piloting an experimental body.

“I’ve slept,” Proto says, knowing how weak his excuse sounds.

“Yeah,” Batou snorts, “for what the Major tells me was two hours in the breakroom, yesterday morning. I know the specifications you were built to, dumbass, it’s part of my job as ops second-in-command, and I know you actually need more rest than that.”

Proto sighs. He can’t object. Not with the alarm in his head complaining over rapidly shrinking intervals of time, to prevent him from staving off his mandatory rest periods forever. There’ll come a point, although he hasn’t reached it yet, where the awful noise just will not stop until he lies down and stays down for two hours. “This is really not a good time for it,” he says instead. 

“I know. I checked out the files you uploaded on the way to work. Don’t tell the Major I was diving and driving, by the way. She’ll chew me out.” Batou grins, and Proto knows why he just said that. It’s to soften the impact of this gentle reprimand. “But tell me honestly, do you think you could trust yourself in combat right now? Or on the road?”

Proto shakes his head, once.

“I thought so,” says Batou. “I’m benching you for the morning. Here.” He reaches over and presses a key into the palm of Proto’s left hand. “That’s the key to one of the apartments upstairs, okay? Go up there after you’ve eaten, and take what time you need to rest. Togusa’s got the PD roped in for manpower. The Major and I are on top of things. We’ll catch your crook, okay?” 

“Okay,” Proto says. He chokes down the rest of the meal bar in front of Batou, and finishes the wretched dregs of his cold cup of coffee.

“And I don’t want to see you back down here for at least three hours, you hear me?” Batou says. 

“Understood.” Proto stands, and so does Batou, and then Batou surprises him by pulling him into a brief, tight hug. 

“You may be literally made of steel and titanium, like I am,” Batou rumbles reassuringly beside Proto’s ear, “but we work as a team, understand? You don’t have to do this alone.” 

Proto would throw his arms around Batou and reciprocate the hug, but they’re pinned gently, if awkwardly to his sides, so he just leans briefly, wearily against Batou’s shoulder for a few seconds. “Thank you,” he whispers. 

“Okay,” Batou says, releasing him. “You’ve eaten. Now get yourself to bed.”

“Yes, sir.” Proto opens the office door and steps out, uploads one last memorandum to Section 9 servers before he takes the elevator upstairs, explaining his theory behind the mutilations — why Ayumi Shibata has acted so, and appending the records pertaining to Satoshi Shibata’s 3D modeling work alongside. Then Proto steps into the silent, empty apartment and strips, leaving his clothes and shoes scattered on the floor, until he is clad only in his socks and boxer briefs. He crawls into the cold, empty bed, burrowing under the covers and closes his eyes. Prepares to put himself on hibernate mode for the first time in a month, because he just can’t bring himself to think for another minute more. 

They’ll call him if they need him, and that will bring him back to full consciousness, he thinks, just before he does so. And then he gives himself over to darkness and oblivion, and sleeps like the dead. 

— 

It’s 11:37AM when Proto wakes up, exactly 3 hours after he fell over and turned his mind off temporarily, and he probes carefully within his thoughts and memories for the emotions that have been swelling uncontrollably within him. His body is rested enough, at least, but the rage and unease are still there, and he finally manages to articulate why he hurts so much within. 

It’s because Satoshi Shibata is an outsider, just like Proto, just for different reasons. And even though he has had it relatively easy looking like he has Western ancestry in a city as cosmopolitan as Niihama City, there are still insults and tests that some of his teammates wouldn’t have to deal with because they don’t stand out the way he does. And every once in a while, an outsider fails a test, and that test costs them their life. 

Proto thinks of Chris Fletcher, a child three-quarters American living in the gilded prison of private security, and how his outsider status failed to protect him from his father’s enemies. He thinks of Kokei Yo, struggling to make enough to pay rent and overhead and the protection money she owes the Korinkai, and still save enough to send her grandson to university. He thinks of the way the customers at Rocky’s and Chroma looked at him, longing for him, but being too afraid to show their desire outside of that narrow space that belonged to them. Of their profound distrust of the police. Of Takumi’s glib, bleak humor about the hostility he’s faced for being gay. And of how that homophobia cost Satoshi Shibata his life. 

Every tiny microaggression that Proto has set aside and told himself was not important rises up, playing back on his eidetic memory, and it drives him to helpless, heaving sobs as he cries like a child for those who he cannot help or save. And cry he does, because he knows despite his relative naivety, or perhaps because of it, that the only thing you can do with such raw pain is to let it out lest it ulcerate and abscess, like the grief Ayumi Shibata felt for her poor dead brother. He weeps quietly into his pillow after the first burst of sorrow has passed, clutching it close to his face, until he begins to shake and the tears run out. And he finds in that place of ringing emptiness a strange equilibrium and clarity. He knows what he has to do now.

Proto gets up and rinses his face in the sink, wipes his face on a towel thoughtfully left on the rack for his use, should he need it. He takes a few sips of cold water from the tap to quench his thirst, sucks in a long, shaky breath, and then exhales, repeating the action a few times while he collects his thoughts. And then he checks Ayumi Shibata’s past work schedule and confirms the suspicion he has had all along, and steps out of the bathroom to retrieve his clothes and dress. The stab-proof vest goes over his undershirt but under his long-sleeved v-neck t-shirt, and his shoulder holster goes over both, but under his rain jacket. His hair is a little tousled from the pillow, but he runs his fingers through it, tames it enough to pull it back and up into a tight manbun with the hair tie and bobby pin he carries in a pocket of his rain jacket.

It wouldn’t do for Proto’s long hair to get in the way, because he’s going to go back to work, and he’s going to put this one cycle of pain to an end, at least. Because he can’t help everyone, but he can at least stop Ayumi Shibata, and maybe find a way for her to escape her own hurt. And he won’t be doing this alone, because he works as part of a team. And they collectively have his back. 

— 

“Togusa,” Proto sends over cybercomm, as he descends in the elevator, “status check. Any of the surveillance teams spotted Ayumi Shibata yet?”

“That’s a negative. No-call-no-show at the logistics company, too, which means we have no idea where she is right now,” Togusa replies. “You rested up?”

“Yes,” Proto says. The elevator dings softly then, and he steps out and into the lobby, takes a left towards one of the briefing rooms. “If everyone will meet me in Briefing Room B. Chief, you’re welcome to sit in, if you wish.”

“Understood,” the reply comes, in several voices, and they begin to file in one by one while Proto plugs himself into the projector system. 

“You’ve all read the memo that I put up before I went upstairs to rest, I’m sure,” Proto says, as he puts a photograph of Satoshi Shibata up on the big screen. One of the glamor shots, not the postmortem ones. Proto would prefer to remember the man who gave him his face this way, suave, smiling faintly as though at a private joke that seems to make sense only to him. 

“Yeah,” Togusa says. “About that.” 

“I know where Ayumi Shibata is,” Proto says, “but first, I need to explain how I got there.” He brings up the photographs of the androids who were destroyed and mutilated by Ayumi Shibata, how they all look like Satoshi. “This is Ayumi’s late brother, Satoshi. He was murdered in 2031. Satoshi was gay, and he propositioned the wrong people. They went along with it, despite the fact that they hated gay people, because they thought they could teach him a lesson for daring to be different from them,” Proto says. He finds his voice gaining strength as he speaks. “They tortured him to death over several days, and left his body in the harbor. Niihama PD leaned on the press somewhat to keep the case quiet, because it was controversial. Because of how sensitive the topic was, because a man dared to proposition another man. As though the murder itself wasn’t the obscenity.” 

Proto dismisses the photo of Satoshi, and centers the bland, smiling faces of the androids who were destroyed. “Before Satoshi died, however, he had himself scanned in a laser measuring booth, and he licensed his likeness to several android and cyborg manufacturers. Because he was beautiful, and because the average facial sculptor is capable only of making a bland amalgamation of attractive features. Each and every one of these androids was sculpted to resemble Satoshi Shibata, in whole or in part.”

“So you think Ayumi Shibata has been mutilating these androids because they look like her brother?” Saito asks. 

“Yes, precisely,” Proto says. “Because how dare they? How dare they bear the face of her lost brother, and continue to walk and talk and be loved when he was taken so cruelly from her? She wants him back. Which brings me to this. You will all have noticed by now that I resemble Satoshi Shibata strongly. This is not an accident. Dr. Kanazawa, who created my body, was too busy to talk to the tissue sculptors who created my face. He left that duty to his doctoral research fellow, Shiori Matsuda. Shiori went to middle school with Ayumi Shibata, and she remembered Satoshi well, because he would bring his little sister to school on the back of his bicycle, every day. So she based my face on her fond memories of her first crush, Satoshi.”

“Damn,” Togusa says. “That makes you a target.” 

“That makes me _the_ target.” Proto glances at his audience, at the Major especially, who had come to a similar conclusion based on the promptings of her Ghost, and she meets his gaze, nods silently in approval. 

“That makes some sense,” Ishikawa says, “but how does this connect back to you? How do you know where she’s going to be?”

“Remember the Fletcher hostage rescue op? We voted to order in afterwards instead of going to a nude bar. So we ordered karaage. The weather was dismal, so we opted to have it delivered by a courier instead of picking it up ourselves.” Proto brings up images drawn from the IR records of the building the Section 9 HQ is in. “Ayumi Shibata was the courier who delivered the food. And as one of the two new recruits, I was tasked with picking the delivery up from her. She has known what I look like, even before I began investigation of this case.” The images up on the big screen are grainy but legible enough, even at this level of magnification, and the woman standing in the lobby with rainwater dripping off her clothes is recognizably Ayumi Shibata. 

“Which brings me to where she’s going to be.” Proto brings up a map projection of Niihama City, centering directly on his apartment building. The konbini he frequents regularly is marked with a small red circle. “She’s not gone to work, or returned to her apartment in the interim, because she’s waiting for me to pick up a package.”

“So what, you’re going to go home to your place in the boondocks,” Saito suggests facetiously, “and go to that konbini, and pick up whatever you’ve got there?”

Proto shrugs. “I’ll have to. They’re going to send it back to the seller if I don’t do it in three days, and they tried to deliver it yesterday.” It’s not as though he can’t just re-order the pencils and sketchbook, even if he’ll be out the cost of the original shipment. But he’s as sure as he can be that Ayumi Shibata is waiting for him there, as sure as he can be without omniscient knowledge of her presence there. The evidence is all there, circumstantial and otherwise. The delivery schedule that places her at the konbini yesterday afternoon. Proto’s signature on the receipt for the karaage. His workname on the package delivery label. And the IR footage that showed her waiting outside the konbini for hours in the rain, up until she gave up around 1AM last night.

“And you think we’re going to let you just… go over there,” Paz asks him, “while a serial killer who resents you for having her dead brother’s face decides to act on her worst impulses?”

“Technically Ayumi Shibata isn’t a serial killer,” Proto says very quietly. “Androids aren’t people, and they can’t be murder victims.” 

“Well, you’re a person, Proto,” Azuma protests, missing Proto’s point. It doesn’t matter whether he’s legally a person or not, as long as there’s some way for someone to construe him as The Other. But that’s fine. The sentiment is solid enough, and they can work on nuance later. 

“Well, yes,” Proto says, pulling the interface jack from the nape of his neck, “but that was most of my plan. Except, of course, I won’t be alone. Because I know you all would never let me do this on my own.” The screen goes blank, and he looks at his comrades, seated across from him in the briefing room. At his superiors, in ascending order of rank. 

“Well,” Batou shrugs, the movement massive despite its slightness, because of his sheer size, “what are we waiting for?”

“Do we have authorization to proceed, Chief?” Major Kusanagi asks, but she’s rising from her chair already, because she knows what Chief Aramaki is going to say. 

“You do, Major,” the Chief says. “Solid investigation work, Proto. And Major. Take good care of him.”

“Proto can take care of himself, Chief,” the Major says, “he’s proven so. But no. We won’t let anything happen to him.” 

“Good,” the Chief says.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Have I been planning this since Krawatte and Kintsugi by planting the seeds of the witnesses and characters in those fics? YES. Why do you think I kept calling attention to how pretty Proto is? BECAUSE I HAD THIS PLANNED ALL ALONG MWAHAHA. Ahem. Anyway. Yeah.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This chapter begins with an arrest and ends with an elegy, as Proto begins to wind up the android mutilations case, the first case he has ever investigated on his own.
> 
> Content warning: Discussion of bigoted parents disowning their 20-year-old LGBTQIA child.

It’s late afternoon, just before 4PM, by the time Proto parks the RX-8 in a parking garage near the konbini in his neighborhood, and he gets out and locks up as though he’s just been sent home early by Batou, or the Major. Which in a way, he has. It doesn’t take all of Section 9 to arrest a single woman, but they’ve taken the time to plan the approach, to minimize chances of officer injury, because they’re still under strength from the losses they took almost five weeks ago. Proto is alone. He has brought no one with him, seemingly, and he stops to grab an overnight bag from the back seat of the RX-8. He knows he’s being shadowed, however, because that’s been arranged beforehand.

There’s something that separates a good tail from a terrible one, and that’s the art of doing absolutely nothing at all. Proto has watched people on the subway to and from work, and he’s noticed that there are some people who everyone ignores. It’s a certain carelessness of body language that’s hard to fake, a blandness of expression. Most people are excellent at it in normal circumstances. They’re just terrible at keeping it up when they think they’re being observed. 

Decent actors know how to do it. Intelligence professionals and pavement artists do too, if they’re any good. So do people who knit in public and who are therefore used to strangers coming up and asking them what they’re making, to Proto’s general amusement. Generally, however, most civilians are terrible at it. They try too hard to act normal and unobtrusive when being watched, which means they stand out in contrast. 

It doesn’t take all of Section 9 to keep tabs on Proto. That many watchers would be unwieldy, too obvious, but it does take several field officers to cover the various approaches which Shibata could take. Borma and Ishikawa are back at HQ, monitoring the IR camera feeds. Batou and the Major are too conspicuous thanks to size and hair color respectively, which leaves Paz, Saito, Azuma, and Togusa as Proto’s discreet tails. They’re doing this low-tech for now, without leaning on thermoptic camouflage, because the batteries drain fast and hard in colder weather. 

Out of the four field officers babysitting Proto, Paz is the best at stealthy approaches. He’s a virtual human shadow, and Proto only spots him because he knows Paz is supposed to be there. Proto manages to identify him based on his very nice shoes, winking in and out of the crowd's collective feet, reflected in puddles of melted slush. Shoes are the one thing a pavement artist won’t have the time to change on the fly. But Paz sticks to homogenous knots of people out for groceries or dinner, his body language brisk, anonymous, as though he’s on an errand. 

Azuma’s not half bad at it, either, and Paz recedes in Proto’s peripheral vision as he takes the turn to the konbini. What Azuma’s good at is a certain amount of shamelessness that must come from being a big guy. He’s good at taking up public space without being thought of as obtrusive as much as just oafish, and what attention he gets is excellent deflection from his purpose. Surely someone this big and clumsy couldn’t be assigned to tail anyone discreetly. But Azuma’s got a past in military intel, and his dossier is full of classified commendations, even if he is a bit abrasive in person. Proto knows very well that personality can serve as a possible indication as to whether someone does well in intel work, but it’s not an absolute yes or no marker. 

“I see Shibata,” Azuma says over cybercomm. “She’s headed for you, Proto, but hanging back a bit.”

Proto pulls the door at the konbini open, and the electronic chime sounds, two cheerful notes. He’s greeted by an android staffer almost immediately. 

“Good afternoon, sir,” the android says, and Proto nods politely, handles his overnight bag a little awkwardly to free up his right hand.

“I’m here to pick up a package,” Proto says, rattling off the tracking code automatically. Facing the counter lets him cover the street with his peripheral vision, and he sees someone in a hooded raincoat looking briefly in the window, recognizes Shibata less by her features, and more by the set of her shoulders, the way her hands hang at her sides. She’s gone again by the time he looks up from the form he has to sign to collect his sketchbook and pencils, though, which makes sense. She’s not going to strike here in public, not with witnesses around. Proto refuses the offer of a bag for the box he’s holding, kneels to unzip his overnight bag and shoves it on top of his clean, folded shirts instead. Then he steps out of the konbini and turns around to head to his apartment. 

“She’s still on your tail,” Paz tells Proto as he walks quickly out of the busy street, keeping the pace of a man who wants nothing more than to go home and be done with his day, but who also isn’t too tired to manage the walk. 

“Got it,” Proto thinks back. Shibata’s using her reflective courier’s raincoat as a form of social invisibility here. Nobody notices couriers. They just exist. It’s like wearing a janitor’s coveralls. There are several ways back to Proto’s apartment from the konbini. His usual route usually takes him through populated streets. But that’s a no-go here, because they don’t want to get civilians involved in the arrest, not especially since Shibata is a violent offender. Proto does not think she will try to take a hostage, but people are unpredictable when exposed to violence. Much better to obviate the chance of casualties by making sure nobody’s going to stumble upon them in the first place. 

And that will also draw Shibata out, allowing her to be subdued and arrested without too much fuss. 

What Proto does instead is pause a third of the way home, and turn towards the parking garage instead, as though he has forgotten something. He pulls the keys for the RX-8 out of his pocket and jingles them in his free left hand as he starts the walk, ignoring Shibata, who he passes on the way back. She’ll double back to follow him, he thinks as they brush past each other, the sleeve of her raincoat rustling against his elbow as he jostles against the flow of pedestrians. 

She looks up at Proto as they pass, her gaze fixed on his face, and stumbles as someone else bumps into her. There’s a brief insult, a warning to look where she’s going, and she apologizes hollowly and shuffles on. He’s got her attention, at least. Good. 

Proto’s back at the RX-8 in the parking garage, and he unlocks it, opens the driver’s side front door to pop the rear suicide door open. He shoves his overnight bag into the passenger seat instead of retrieving the garment bag containing his glen plaid suit, which he left there just to contrive his return. And then he shuts the doors, and waits. 

He’s parked halfway up on the fourth deck, instead of closer to the ground floor, because nobody’s going to drive up all this way unless all the other spaces are full, and they’re not going to be at this time in the day, when the first commuters home have only just left their workplaces for the day. The elevator leading to this deck is coming up, and he sees the lights indicating its rise blink on and off one by one. The heavy metal doors slide open, and Shibata is standing between them. She steps out. The reflective silver raincoat she’s wearing matches the ghost-gray metallic paint job on Proto’s RX-8, an odd symmetry and a fearful one, as she steps up to close the distance between them. 

“You’ve been following me,” Proto says, apropos of nothing. He is one man, unarmed, with a car to his back, and his body language is loose and relaxed, indicating nothing of the situation he’s in. 

“Satoshi bleached his hair out once. But he never wore it long like you. Not even once.” Ayumi Shibata’s voice is light, soft, but Proto can hear the quaver in the monotone of her speech, that shiver that speaks of a soul pushed beyond trauma and grief into something temporarily beyond the limits of sanity. She’s as pretty as her brother once was under the hood of her raincoat, her eyes dark, striking, and haunted. Satoshi didn’t have eyes left after the fish in the harbor had found his body. 

“Is that what you want?” Proto asks her, “For me to be him?” They’re standing less than a meter apart now, and this close he remembers how small she is — she’s barely over 1.6 meters tall. But he senses a violent wiry strength in her, developed from years of hauling packages all over Niihama City for the uneven pay and nonexistent benefits of a gig economy worker. 

“No,” Shibata says. “You’re wrong. You’re all wrong. There's always something wrong.” 

“How am I wrong?” Proto asks her. Togusa and Saito are hiding behind pillars in this parking garage, ready to act as soon as he gives the signal, but he does not. He wants to talk to Shibata, to see if he can persuade her to come in peacefully. He wants to do this for Shiori, whose friend Shibata was. 

“Your voice. The color of your skin, your hair. Your eyes.” Shibata twitches a little on the spot, as though fighting a shiver. “And you’re too tall. Satoshi was never this tall unless he wore lifts in his shoes. He did that once, you know, to model some suits. But I guess it makes sense for someone who works in security to be tall.” She steps up to Proto and reaches up, left-handed, to caress his face. Her fingers are cold, so cold, and Proto wonders about the last time she ate something that didn’t come out of a vending machine. “What did you look like, before you got this body?”

“Different,” Proto says, which is not exactly a lie. His consciousness came into being before he was installed in a body, but his memory, biologic components, and neurochip all lived in a custom Poseidon-made braincase, hooked up to a diagnostic console with which he could communicate, using text. “Not as pretty, nor as tall.” 

“Did you choose this face because you wanted to be beautiful?” Shibata’s hand lingers on the curve of Proto’s jaw, and he takes gentle hold of her wrist, closes his own fingers around it. She’s beginning to shake, but she does not pull away. She’s going to act soon, and he knows it. 

“Proto.” That’s Togusa, his voice dropping into a low warning over cybercomm. “Give the word.” Proto understands Togusa’s worry, but it’s unlikely that Shibata could ever hurt him, even this close. Enhanced strength and reflexes aside, he’s still wearing the stab-proof vest from this morning, and he has a good 19cm and 30 to 45kg on her. Besides, all her previous targets have been civilian android models, incapable of fighting back.

“I’ve got her,” Proto thinks back at him, “it’s under control.” He activates his enhanced reflexes and tightens his grip on her left wrist, gives her a swift tug to knock her off balance. It’s barely a fight, tiny as she is against his own significant height advantage and more-than-human strength. Shibata screams, a sound of pain and raw betrayal as Proto pins her left hand just below her shoulder blades, and he uses the limits of her human anatomy against her to force her to her knees. From there it’s a simple operation to reach for the handcuffs he’s carrying and close them upon her wrists. “Ayumi Shibata,” Proto says softly, not ungently, “you are under arrest for multiple counts of property destruction.” 

Shibata cries out again, a long howl of loss and grief, and she lets herself drop to the prefab concrete floor. Her knees slide out from under her, and her shoulders shake in sheer, utter despair as Togusa and Saito drop their thermoptic camo and flicker into full visibility behind her. Proto reaches into Shibata’s raincoat pocket and finds the cleaver she’s carrying in a makeshift cardboard sheath, pulls it out and drops it with a final, sad ring as its metal handle hits the cold, hard floor. And then he reaches out to her and helps her off the floor of the parking deck, steadying her by her shoulders. 

Shibata does not resist, but she wobbles on her knees, tears running down her face, dripping off her chin to soak into her t-shirt and bounce off the rustly silver fabric of her raincoat, and in the end Proto pulls her upright against his shoulder, as he kneels at her side, tries to find something to say. 

“I’m sorry,” doesn’t feel right, nor does “everything will be okay.” In the end Proto settles on this. “I didn’t choose my face,” he tells Shibata, as she sobs against his shoulder. “My body is a custom job, and I have the face I do, because your old friend Shiori Matsuda worked on me. She remembers Satoshi with so much love, and she gave me his face, because that was the face of someone she cared about.” 

Shibata sucks in a long, shivery breath, and she lets Proto help her to her feet, manages to stand on her own power. She shivers, and she presses her face again to Proto’s chest, and he does not stop her. “It’s not right,” she moans against his rain jacket, her breath condensing wetly on its waterproof weave, “it’s not fair that he had to die. That they had to kill him.” 

“I know it’s not fair,” Proto tells her, as Togusa begins to pull her away from him. “And I can’t ever make that right for you. But Satoshi is loved, and I consider it an honor to wear his face.”

Shibata does not look up, does not look at Proto again, and he knows from his analysis of her body language that she does not do so because it hurts her far too much to see her lost brother’s face again. But she does not fight or resist as Togusa and Saito help her into the back of a Section 9 car. 

“You did good, rookie,” someone says in Proto’s head, over cybercomm. It’s Paz, and Proto turns to find him standing by the elevator to the parking deck, next to Azuma. 

“That didn’t feel good,” Proto tells him, truthfully, using his voice this time. He sticks a hand in a pocket of his rain jacket, pulls out another pair of latex gloves and puts them on, pulls an evidence bag from another. He picks up the cleaver with one gloved hand and drops it into the evidence bag, then pulls out a marker from the pocket he had the gloves in, and labels it correctly. 

“No, this sort of thing never ends well,” Paz says, lighting up another cigarette as he does. “Go ask Batou about how he felt after the Marco Amoretti case. The only thing you get is a general sense of relief that nobody else is going to be hurt this time. But then there’s always another case, and more people getting hurt.” This is the most voluble Paz has ever been around Proto, or really, any of the other Section 9 field officers, in Proto’s brief experience with the team as a whole. Paz is typically quiet, taciturn, a loner, who prefers to keep his own counsel and play his cards very close to his chest.

“Eh,” Azuma says, shrugs. “You did this without firing a single shot. Nobody got hurt or was killed. I’d call that a win, and we can’t win them all.” Proto lets Azuma clap him on the shoulder, and he lets out a long, low sigh. 

“Yeah,” Proto says after he’s finished sighing. “Let’s go back to the HQ. I’ll have paperwork to do.” 

“And dinner to eat,” Azuma says, nodding. “Because you’re going to let us feed you, right? You closed your first case.” 

“I suppose I’ll have to,” Proto agrees. “You all still owe me for that yakiniku dinner you all had while I was still laid up in Harima.” 

“You too?” Azuma laughs, entirely unserious. “As though Ishikawa hasn’t reminded us of how cruel we were to do that while he was also in the hospital. You two crybabies can have a double helping of beef tonight. How’s that sound?” 

“Agreeable,” Proto says, and means it. Yakiniku is always a good bet in Niihama City, when they’re this close to Kobe and its famous beef ranches. 

“Well,” Paz says, “I’ll go ahead of you, then.” He flicks the ash off his cigarette and stalks off to the stairwell, to find his car, parked on one of the lower decks of the parking garage. 

“Which means you’re stuck with me, Proto,” Azuma says.

“That’s fine,” Proto says, and he means that too. 

—

Proto’s sitting at his desk in his office when an Operator brings him a fresh mug of coffee, and he thanks her, as is his usual habit, and takes a sip only after she leaves. He’s been filling out paperwork surrounding what he’s now calling the Shibata case — mostly the arrest report, the evidence form for the cleaver. It’s funny, Proto thinks, how people still call it paperwork when most of the paperwork Section 9 generates is digitized for ease of organization and reference. To a bystander, it would look as though Proto is just sitting at his desk, woolgathering, when he’s doing the bulk of the work mentally. 

And unlike most of his colleagues, Proto holds no particular horror or fear of paperwork. Most field officers consider paperwork a waste of time that could be used for more important things such as range time, training exercises, or personal recreation. Proto doesn’t generally lose eight hours a day sleeping, though, and he likes to get caught up on his paperwork while his body rests, in bed. That’s one of the reasons why he’s been unofficially chosen to act as the Chief’s aide and occasional secretary. 

No, Proto is doing his paperwork now, because there’s been something he’s been putting off. It’s displacement activity. He takes another hot sip of coffee and sighs quietly in satisfaction, and then puts his mug down and leaves his office. He takes the elevator up to the level where the Tachikoma hangar is, but he takes a left down that hallway instead of a right, to the in-house labs that Section 9 runs. There’s a particular lab he wants to go to, today, and he walks down the end of a narrow hallway, barely enough for two people side by side. That’s where Section 9 have relocated Proto’s maintenance lab to, now that he’s officially a field officer.

Dr. Kanazawa is nowhere to be seen — he’s probably working in the fabrication labs currently, on a pet project or another, but Shiori is at her desk, reading a hardcopy engineering journal, and she looks up when Proto taps gently at the door, and smiles. 

“Proto,” Shiori says, after he steps inside. “I’m glad you’re fine.” She puts her journal down, and attempts to rise, but Proto waves the gesture off. Instead he commandeers one of the other techs’ office chairs and wheels it over to her desk. 

“I’m sorry I had to hang up on you this morning.” Proto says, after he’s scooted close enough to talk to her. There really isn’t a dignified way to wheel oneself across an office floor while also occupying an office chair, he has just learned. “We had a lot going on. I’m sorry I had to wake you too.” 

“No,” she says, “it’s okay.” 

“About Ayumi,” he begins to say, and Shiori blinks hard, behind her glasses. 

“I know Satoshi is dead. I just found out, after you’d called me. I did a search, you know? To figure if something weird was going on. I guess I missed it in the news, his murder. That was about when Dr. Kanazawa had me liaising with Locus-Solus on your face. How strange.”

“It is an odd coincidence,” Proto agrees. He used not to believe in coincidences, but they happen anyway, and sometimes there is no way to explain them away. 

“Did I make a mistake, giving you Satoshi’s face?” Shiori asks, and Proto realizes she’s on the verge of tears. The Section 9 field officers don’t always share information with the techs for valid security reasons, but this maintenance lab is right by one of the forensics analysis labs, and she probably gets gossip from the forensic techs who work here. Shiori is one of the smartest people Proto has known, and it would have been trivial for her to put two and two together from Proto’s hurried phone call earlier today, and what she has already heard from her colleagues. 

“No,” Proto says, and it’s true. “You didn’t. Really. I’m proud to wear the face of someone you cared for.” 

“I’m glad. And Ayumi?” Shiori asks. Her hands are starting to shake from barely-concealed anxiety, and Proto takes one of her hands in his, warms it with his own. 

“Ayumi Shibata hasn’t actually hurt anyone, and I’ve discussed it with the Chief.” Proto says with a shrug. “It would do little good and a lot of harm to send her to prison, so we’re remanding her to a mental health facility.” He personally isn’t sure if she is going to recover from this, but it doesn’t mean they shouldn’t try to help her do so. 

“That’s good, then,” Shiori says with a somber nod, as Proto lets her now-warm hand go. “I know you didn’t have to tell me this, Proto, so thank you for giving me the news.” 

He stands, nods. “Thank you for always taking care of me.”

“It’s my job.” Shiori smiles at him, a little sadly, and gives him a little wave before he turns to walk out of the lab. 

—

“The Shibatas were Pentacostal Christians, believers in prosperity gospel, and converts tend to be more fervent than people who were raised in the religion,” Proto says to Detective Aizawa, who has forgotten her katsudon and bowl of miso soup temporarily as she listens attentively. “Anyway, they threw Satoshi out of the house when he came out to them, in early January 2026. Ayumi was working on her university entrance exams, then, but she refused to live without her older brother, so she packed her bags up and went with him.” 

“Damn,” Detective Aizawa says, her gaze full of reproach and silent fury. It’s been three days since Proto had arrested Ayumi Shibata, and this has been the first time they were both free to meet, so that he can update her on what happened since he took the Shibata case over from her. This donburi joint is her choice, a popular lunch option for officers at the prefectural police headquarters, which means a Niihama PD detective and a Section 9 field officer talking shop is routine business to the staff there.

“Satoshi managed to make ends meet by working as a call boy,” Proto continues, “but he never let his sister get involved in the water-and-willow world, so she used her scooter license and did delivery work. That’s what they did for a living up until he was scouted by a fashion photographer in 2028, and started getting steady work. Male models don’t get paid as much as female ones, though, so he did something a lot of young models do. He licensed his likeness to prosthetic makers. Or, should I say, his modelling agency did, and they gave him a monthly cut. I think he used the money to help Ayumi go back to cram school, she was going to retake the university entrance examinations the year he was killed.”

Detective Aizawa ponders that information glumly over a slice of tonkatsu, before she makes up her mind, and pops it into her mouth. “Have you called the parents?” she asks, after she swallows her bite of crispy fried pork. 

“Yes,” Proto says with a shrug. He had done so two days ago, to little avail. “They claimed to have no children, and hung up on me.” 

“Assholes,” Detective Aizawa fumes, as Proto picks up and eats a morsel of kakuni — soy-simmered pork belly, tender and rich. 

“Agreed,” Proto says mildly, after he swallows his own mouthful of food. He ordered the buta kakuni don because he thought it would be droll to eat pork in a cop-favored restaurant, but it’s actually very good. Besides, calling Niihama PD pigs would imply that he himself is of suine origins, given Section 9 field officers’ law enforcement powers. 

“So, Ayumi Shibata is completely screwed,” Aizawa says sadly. She stares down at her bowl of katsudon as though hoping that the remnants of her tonkatsu will rise up and convince her to resume eating it. “She has no education beyond high school, no real prospects, and now, a permanent arrest record, plus the stigma of being mentally ill, and her parents won’t even take her back.”

“Well, it’s not so bad as all that,” Proto tells her. “There’s the inheritance.” He picks up another morsel of kakuni, eats that too. 

Detective Aizawa frowns, confused. “What inheritance? Isn’t she disowned at this point?”

“Well, it turns out Satoshi left his little sister a tidy sum,” Proto says. “Not a huge amount of money, but probably enough for her to live on while she retakes the entrance exams and goes to university. I understand there’s a small annuity, too, from the facial licensing fees.”

Proto’s mild, bland tone of voice provokes a blink from Detective Aizawa, a certain facial expression that vacillates between approval and annoyance. “You went and scared the modelling agency into signing the licensing payments over to her.”

“I can neither confirm nor deny that.” In truth, Proto didn’t even bother calling the modelling agency in question. The hack was a trivial one, completed over twenty minutes worth of his lunch hour a day ago.

“You are a horrible man, Hajime Iwasaki,” Detective Aizawa says, as though that has anything to do with the subject of discussion, “but you’re the good kind of horrible.” She begins to attack her lunch with a renewed appetite after saying that, as though her mood has improved. 

“Thank you,” Proto says, before he, too, turns to his meal. 

—

It’s been eight days since the hostage rescue and a week since Proto began his investigation of the Shibata case, and things have finally settled down to a semblance of normalcy at Section 9. Proto never questions his sense of time, because the cycles of thought that are his existence are governed by a very accurate clock built into his biologic processor unit. But it does seem a little surreal that so much happened in the span of three, four days. Proto knows that’s not actually true, though. The information required to crack the case had been there all along. It just took an investigator with Section 9’s backing and power to acquire it all and lay it out in one virtual place, so that all the fragments of truth could be put together into a coherent whole.

Proto stands before Satoshi Shibata’s lonely niche in a columbarium just outside of Niihama City limits, where his ashes lie. Proto has driven out here at the end of his work day, to pay silent respects to the man who gave him his face. The niche is clean, bare of the omnipresent stains of pollution, and it is clear that Ayumi Shibata had visited it regularly until her arrest, to leave offerings and to scrub it of soot deposits from the city smog. She had never left incense at her brother’s tomb, owing to their Christian upbringing, but the withered stems of cut chrysanthemums speak mutely to her frequent visits, and Proto had plucked them from the holder and discarded them, before placing his own floral tribute in their place. He has brought green-dyed carnations, a departure from the traditional Japanese funerary flower, but it seemed the right kind of symbol to bring to the grave of a gay man murdered by homophobes. 

It is the least he can do, Proto thinks, a last gesture made to put this case behind him. “Your sister is safe in our care for now,” he tells Satoshi’s ashes, “and your old friend Shiori is going to visit her regularly, to make sure she’ll be okay. I’ve done what little is within my power to make sure that the justice she faces will be tempered with mercy. I hope you forgive this presumptuousness from a stranger you have never known, but I thought you should hear the news.”

Proto feels a bit foolish, speaking to the ashes of someone he isn’t related to, who he doesn’t know, especially because he does not believe in life after death. Where Ghosts go after their owners die, he does not know. But it had felt like the right thing to do, and still does now. He holds his hands together in mute prayer to a higher power that he is fairly sure does not exist, and bows formally, politely to Satoshi one last time, taking his leave, before he turns around and walks out to the parking lot to find the RX-8. He’s got a little time yet before his next appointment, dinner at an izakaya with Takumi, who would like to meet again. 

Dinner is not going to be anything more than a friendly chat over good food and beer, but it will be nice to hear Takumi talk about work today, Proto thinks, to listen to what normal life is like for someone who doesn’t have to grapple with life, death, and ethics during their work week. And Takumi is a good dinner companion, witty and glib. He’s probably going to make a good friend, if Proto can keep him. 

Proto climbs into the driver’s seat of the RX-8 and shuts the door, puts on his seat belt before he turns the key in the ignition, and its engine turns over smoothly, with a low reassuring rumble. The Wankel rotary engine fills him with a raw, skin-level pleasure at how its vibrations pass through the car’s transmission and frame and up the steering column, into the steering wheel. He’s got two and a half hours until dinner. Maybe he can use the time to pad out his wardrobe and find a satchel to carry files and documents in. It beats wandering around Niihama City with his papers in a paper grocery bag, like some kind of destitute lawyer. 

Proto pulls out of the columbarium parking lot and onto the road leading back out to the main highway, and on the way there he dials a number in his contacts list, waits for the ringtone. The phone on the other end rings once, twice, and then someone picks up. 

“Asuda,” the person on the other end says, and Proto smiles at the sound of his father and creator’s voice in his head.

“Hello, Father,” Proto says speechlessly, keeping part of his attention focused on the road. “How are you doing this evening?”

“Oh, I’m doing well, Hajime,” Dr. Asuda says. “The warmer weather of the last two days has been nice to these old bones. And you?”

“Work’s been challenging,” Proto thinks, very honestly, “but I think I’m over that hump now. And I made some friends. Friends who weren’t already coworkers, I mean.”

“Friends? I wouldn’t know much about having friends myself, being such a loner,” Dr. Asuda says, just a little facetiously. “But they’re generally thought of as good to have.” 

Proto thinks of Takumi and his surprising chivalry, and of Detective Aizawa’s tarnished idealism and her refusal to abandon hope for a better world.“They are,” he agrees.

“That’s good, then,” Dr. Asuda says. 

The highway unfurls in front of Proto, all the way back to Niihama City, and the RX-8 roars, low and confident as it devours the kilometres and takes him back towards friends and home. Shadows lengthen and then dissolve with the darkening sky, and Niihama City shines with its own light against the encroaching night, a tarnished jewel against the Seto Inland Sea.


End file.
